The NBII has been involved in metadata standards, creation, quality control, and hosting since the early 1990s.   Standards such as: Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) Biological Data Profile, Dublin Core, Darwin Core, and Open GIS are all used within the Program.  

The NBII Metadata Program includes: training sessions and workshops; metadata development tools; metadata creation services;  quality control/metadata review;  and an integrated FGDC based metadata clearinghouse that provides access to over 40 distributed biological metadata clearinghouse nodes (http://mercury.ornl.gov/nbii/) and simultaneous access to all metadata content through the NBII BioBot Search Tool (http://search.nbii.gov).