Preface Standards development within the Information Technology sector is harmonized with international standards development. Through the CSA Technical Committee on Information Technology (TCIT), Canadians serve as the SCC Mirror Committee (SMC) on ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) for the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the ISO member body for Canada and sponsor of the Canadian National Committee of the IEC. Also, as a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Canada participates in the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (ITU-T). For brevity, this Standard will be referred to as \"CAN/CSA-ISO/IEC 19788-8\" throughout. At the time of publication, ISO/IEC 19788-8:2015 is available from ISO and IEC in English only. CSA Group will publish the French version when it becomes available from ISO and IEC. Scope 1.1 Scope of MLR multipart standard The primary purpose of this International Standard is to specify metadata elements and their attributes for the description of learning resources. This includes the rules governing the identification of data elements and the specification of their attributes. This International Standard provides data elements for the description of learning resources and resources directly related to learning resources. This International Standard provides principles, rules, and structures for the specification of the description of a learning resource. It also identifies and specifies the attributes of a data element, as well as the rules governing their use. The key principles stated in ISO/IEC 19788-1 are informed by a user requirements-driven context with the aim of supporting multilingual and cultural adaptability requirements from a global perspective. ISO/IEC 19788-1 is information technology neutral and defines a set of common approaches, i.e. methodologies and constructs, which apply to the development of the subsequent parts of ISO/IEC 19788. 1.2 Scope of this part of ISO/IEC 19788 This part of ISO/IEC 19788 provides data elements for the description of MLR records: sets of data elements describing a learning resource [and resources directly related to that learning resource, e.g. persons (authors, contributors), annotations, learning activities, metadata records, etc.]. It can also be used to keep track of the record editing process including global metadata author identification, last record update, and application profile used for the description of a learning resource. These elements can later be combined with other descriptive elements from other parts of ISO/IEC 19788 or other standards to provide the description of a learning resource and of related entities needed for that description. This part of ISO/IEC 19788 enables the storage of learning resource description in the traditional database approach and the exchange of descriptions through harvesting mechanisms).