Despite substantial investment in the development of digital repositories, and of services based upon their content, there is little real understanding as to how these repositories and services interact beyond a technical level and a marked absence of a conceptual framework for such interactions. As a result, service development takes place with little reference to the context in which repositories are being developed, and repositories derive little benefit from the services that utilise their content. The establishment of such a framework could unlock potential benefits, in terms of metadata quality and metadata workflow efficiency, throughout the community as individual repositories and services understand and exploit their interactions and the context in which they take place [1]. A conceptual framework for the interactions between repositories and services must include not only repository level interactions the ‘ecology of repositories' [2] but also the lifecycle of the objects within repositories and the lifecycle of the metadata associated with them.