To make learning materials easy to find, a clear and unambiguous description of the learning materials is crucial. A description must be added to the content of each digital information source. What kind of information is it? What type of file? Who is the author? Who is the information intended for? This metadata must contain all the information the teacher needs to be able to find and use the right learning arrangement.

There is an international standard for metadata: IEEE LOM (Learning Object Metadata). A variant of this has been created for Dutch education: NL LOM. This agreement dates from 2011. The PDF contains a number of links that are no longer up to date (due to the development of the OnderwijsBegrippenKader and the phasing out of the Vocabulairebank). The most recent version of the agreement can be found on the NL-LOM wiki.