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Abstract
Institutional repositories are an exciting innovation in scholarly communication. Liberal arts institutions have a specific mission and a unique opportunity to create a repository collection that reflects this tradition. However, the challenges of cost, staffing, infrastructure, standardized metadata, and content recruitment that are part and parcel of developing institutional repositories may be daunting to individual liberal arts institutions. The idea that multiple, like-minded institutions could join forces to share their efforts, unique challenges, and maximize their efficiencies grew into the Liberal Arts Scholarly Repository (LASR). In order for the group to form, we first agreed upon a mission, collections policies, and technical specifications including metadata best practices to ensure the interoperability and facilitate searching of the repository. This article outlines the history of the project and the process of collaborating on metadata standards.