gathering metadata

After having several conversation with Cliff and with the egranary librarians, it was decided that the next steps would be to start gathering metadata.  There are various steps and ways to do this.  I had a meeting with Casse, the office manager and Rachel, who has been working at Widernet for a long time.  I honestly had no idea where to start and how to get something like this done. One of thier suggestions was to ask  our current contacts to ask if they had their items cataloged and if we could have their metadata.  A second suggestion was to look in OCLC to see what already is there, OCLC will give us metadata.  Also, DMOZ allows for people to use their metadata and Open Arcvhives has a metadata harvester project.
I’m still not very clear with this, because I’ve never done it, so I’m just going to read up and keep asking questions as they come up.