The digital environment increases pressures on the museum community to construct unified metadata solutions that are compatible with metadata solutions from other cultural institutions. This paper discusses the challenges of museum metadata implementation and outlines a strategy devised for the state-wide initiative in North Carolina to create an on-line portal for cultural institution material. It outlines the prominence of museums in North Carolina's cultural institutions from survey results, and, through the experiences of a metadata working group, it addresses the issues of museum metadata. Those issues include the variety of existing collection management systems, metadata diversity, semantics struggles and the problem of the digital divide. The paper proposes a search and retrieval solution and concludes with a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of museum metadata in this kind of effort.