RLI 283 Metastatic Metadata 35 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC 2013 that results only from technological breadth, diversity, and catholic experience with the broad spectrum of publics. In the authors’ experience, shared responsibilities and intensive collaboration are bred in the bone of special collections departments, even those bereft of digital expertise. This may be the point. In a project like UPP, the question of sustainability hovers always overhead, and to be sure, sustain- ability is no more guaranteed than success. UMass enjoyed some structural advantages in conducting the experiment thanks to the peculiar skills resident in SCUA, but, advantages or not, scaling up from instruction to mass production would require a shift away from voluntary participation and an increase in time commitment, upping the conflict with other, daily work. But this misses the point. Just as most academic libraries face similar challenges to UMass, most have similar skill sets resident somewhere on staff that can be put to the same ends. What is needed is what the authors consider the heart of UPP: administrative support for a model for conveying the cooperative ethos of special collections across departmental boundaries, using an engaging project and a sense of communal purpose as a bridge to the digital future. It is the ethos that needs to be sustained, not the project per se, and if the adaptation the authors witnessed among UPP participants is any guide, UMass Libraries may have taken their first steps. © 2013 Robert S. Cox, Danielle Kovacs, Rebecca Reznick-Zellen, Aaron Rubinstein, and Jeremy Smith This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/. To cite this article: Robert S. Cox, Danielle Kovacs, Rebecca Reznick-Zellen, Aaron Rubinstein, and Jeremy Smith. “Metastatic Metadata: Transferring Digital Skills and Digital Comfort at UMass Amherst.” Research Library Issues: A Report from ARL, CNI, and SPARC, no. 283 (2013): 31-35. http://publications.arl. org/rli283/.