The emergence of the Internet, the World Wide Web and electronic governments have brought challenges to the work of managing different types of electronic information resources. These information resources require different metadata elements that help to explain the technical and administrative processes used to create, capture, manipulate, retrieve, use, store and preserve electronic information. There are numerous types of metadata standards, systems and tools for information retrieval that are used by different communities to manage their electronic information resources. A study was conducted to identify the use of metadata standards amongst Malaysian government agencies. The data revealed that many Malaysian government agencies did not adhere to any specific standard in developing, providing and preserving information in electronic form. This paper describes the context of the study and the results of the research are presented along with suggestions for further important areas of research, specifically on 'record-keeping metadata'.