That was the topic discussed recently by OCLC Research Library Partners metadata managers, initiated by Naun Chew of Cornell and Joan Swanekamp of Yale. As libraries have increased collecting commercial electronic resources, instituted local or shared digitization programs, and moved to cloud-based services, more bibliographic and inventory information is being managed outside the traditional catalog, such as in separate repositories or through commercial services. The need to manage and integrate data from many different sources presents a different set of challenges from working primarily within a single central system.
Source: HangingTogether: Synchronizing metadata among different databases