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The article is focused on the concept of interoperability, whose relevance is also demonstrated by the existence of the Guidelines on technical interoperability of Public Administrations on which the Threeyear plan for IT in Public Administration is based. The essential condition for interoperability is the existence of metadata that exactly describe an object; this is especially important in the digital environment. There are different types of metadata – descriptive, administrative, structural, preservation, usage – and scientific communities have developed different metadata schemes that, if maintained by organisations such as the International Organisation for Standardisation, assume the status of standards. Data quality and openness are fundamental requirements for the exchange of information. Since the Ontario New Universities Library Project - ONULP (1963), libraries have been using metadata for automatic data processing; the article reviews the MARC format, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), the national and international standard (ISO 23950) Z39.50, the Open archival information system (OAIS). Interoperability is a recent field of study and it has not yet been fully achieved; in the digital environment, interdisciplinarity has led to the search for exchange with other contexts.
