Open Metadata Policy*

The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries (The Alliance) recognizes that research, discovery, and scholarly communications are critically reliant on metadata. Scholars, publishers, librarians, archivists and knowledge organizations have, for centuries, engaged in cooperative metadata exchange and enrichment in building the commonwealth of human knowledge.  

While the primary function of these data are to enable timely discovery of, and access to, library collections, we recognize that they also have subsequent value as collections of highly structured data about information resources. It is now more possible and valuable than ever for institutions, researchers, and creators to explore, synthesize, and reuse metadata in novel ways. Open metadata is a catalyst for collaboration between libraries which is a fundamental value of librarianship.

The Alliance is committed to open sharing and reuse of metadata. The Alliance and its member institutions release library metadata with a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0), wherever possible. Patron data, business data, and data with contractual, copyright, privacy or security concerns are excluded from this policy. 

The Alliance also supports open metadata by investing in open infrastructure, when possible, and contracts for value-added services; the Alliance objects to contracts that restrict metadata reuse. When engaged in cooperative projects, the Alliance works to establish that all metadata produced therein will be open.

The Alliance requests (but does not require) that, when feasible, users acknowledge the skill and labor involved in the creation and stewardship of metadata by providing attribution to the metadata creator as the data source. In the spirit of information sharing, the Alliance encourages you to make any enrichments or derivatives of this metadata freely available under a CC0 license.

Approved by the Alliance Board of Directors February 13, 2026

*The Alliance liberally borrowed from the open metadata policies of Stanford University Libraries and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the creation of this policy.