What began in 1998 as the Colorado Digitization Project is now known as the Collaborative Digitization Program (CDP). The CDP’s Heritage West database represents not only the primary product of the organization, but also one of the oldest continuously operating collaborative repositories of cultural heritage metadata in the country. As a basis for the author’s forthcoming quantitative and qualitative analysis of Dublin Core metadata in Heritage West, the following article offers a history of how the CDP has, over time, organized and managed the metadata provision for its digitization projects.