The municipality of Atheria is embarking on a five-year project to digitize its historical archives, encompassing a wide range of documents from property deeds and council meeting minutes to photographs and architectural blueprints. The project team, led by archivist Elara Vance, recognizes the critical role of metadata in ensuring the long-term accessibility, discoverability, and preservation of these digital records. Given the diverse nature of the records, the project\'s extended timeline, and the municipality\'s commitment to open data principles, which metadata standard should Elara recommend to provide the most effective and sustainable framework for managing metadata across the entire digitization project, considering potential future needs for data sharing and interoperability with other municipal departments and external research institutions? The team needs a solution that balances detailed description with long-term maintainability and broad compatibility.