As for us, we were both bored stiff with the cataloging classes forced on us in library school. A cataloging schema, we believed, was easy to create, easy to implement, and easy to adhere to. Subfields, so crucial to MARC, are not relevant to Web metadata. Not everyone on the tech report team understood the purpose of all the metadata fields. As a result, a certain amount of slop crept into the application of metadata.
Computers are stupid.
The format of fields, and exact adherence to the format, is crucial. As we convened our meeting on metadata standards, a series of challenges unfolded. There were legacy records in our online library systems from the old days of paper publication of technical reports. For example, our old numbering scheme was not Y2K-compliant, so we needed to add a few digits anyway. Our ultimate result was a new system for dealing with electronic records a carefully constructed metadata set of roughly 30 items from which we would use a Perl script to build actual MARC records to populate the library catalog.