In an era of open data and research data management movements, the research community is facing a growing number of metadata models and standards, recommendations and requirements for research data. It’s enough to make your head spin and get lost. This presentation provides guidance for surviving in the metadata jungle. We will present findings from a crosswalk of metadata models relevant to CESSDA ERIC, European data archives, and researchers in the social sciences. These include, for example, OpenAIRE, the DDI-based CESSDA Data Catalogue metadata and CESSDA Metadata Model, Dublin Core, DataCite, da|ra and Dataverse. We will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the ‘lowest common denominator' approach to resource metadata compared to a ‘rich disciplinary metadata’ approach like the DDI, and provide some examples of data services and their take on metadata. The presentation builds on the work of CESSDA's Metadata Management and DataverseEU projects, and Data Without Boundaries project.