This article offers the reader a broad perspective of the main initiatives relating to digital audio-visual documentation. To this end a review is made of the standards designed within both the broadcasting industry and standards organisations. Among the standards highlighted are Mpeg-7, Smil, rdf, Dublin core and TV-Anytime. The Smpte metadata dictionary is also described, with special emphasis on those elements of greater importance, such as KLV and Umid. Subsequently, certain initiatives carried out within the area of libraries and archives are mentioned with short descriptions provided of ViDE, Mets, Data Dictionary for Audio/Video Metadata and the Nedlib project. The article concludes with an example of how the standards described have been applied within the environment of the "Red Iberoamericana de Documentación Multimedia" —Iber-American Network of Multimedia Documentation—, where a framework is being developed for an empirical testing of the above
mentioned standards.