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Metadata is one of the keys for digital archiving and preservation. This is well recognized as an important issue in our networked information society. There are several standards for archival and preservation metadata, e.g. ISAD(G), EAD, AGRkMS, PREMIS, and OAIS. This leads to selection and interoperability issues for metadata standards in the design of metadata schemas for particular archival systems. This paper identifies features of metadata standards to appropriately select, combine and use them in the resource lifecycle. We present a feature analysis of the metadata standards by identifying the primary resource lifecycle stage(s) where a standard would be applied. Based on this feature analysis, this paper proposes a framework to help selection, combination and use of metadata schemas for digital archiving and preservation.