The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been funded to create a collection registry and item-level metadata repository for digital collections and content created under the auspices of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant (NLG) program. The first stages of developing the collection registry are described: defining a collection; surveying current collection description schemas and registries; and determining which schema to use and whether to modify it. Next steps will include populating the registry, testing the efficacy of the schema and designing internal and public interface.