Metadata is one of the keys for digital archiving and preservation. This is well recognized as an important issue in our networked information society. There are several standards for archival and preservation metadata, e.g. ISAD(G), EAD, AGRkMS, PREMIS, and OAIS. This leads to selection and interoperability issues for metadata standards in the design of metadata schemas for particular archival systems. This paper identifies features of metadata standards to appropriately select, combine and use them in the resource lifecycle. We present a feature analysis of the metadata standards by identifying the primary resource lifecycle stage(s) where a standard would be applied. Based on this feature analysis, this paper proposes a framework to help selection, combination and use of metadata schemas for digital archiving and preservation. Then, we propose to categorize metadata elements using 5W1H attributes ? What, Why, Where, Who, When and How ? coupled with a task model derived from the resource lifecycle. In this study, metadata elements of the chosen standards are categorized using the 5W1H attributes and mapped to each other. The mappings are grouped and sorted in accordance with the task model. The 5W1H and task models are applied to six element sets chosen from major metadata standards. Thus, the proposed models help us identify contexts of descriptive elements and define crosswalks among standards.