ABSTRACT Established in 2005, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL)’s Libraries’ institutional repository (IR) has approximately 99,500 unique items. It is one of the largest and most-used institutional repositories in the United States. This presentation explores how UNL is working to meet the challenge of consistently and accurately identifying individual researchers and their scholarly *activities*. It examines UNL’s metadata practices for its IR, giving a more detailed explanation of personal names and Open Researcher and Contributor ID identifiers. It reviews some typical metadata problems found in UNL’s IR. Finally, it explores priorities for metadata maintenance and what is sustainable and worthwhile. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0361526X.2019.1540270 -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.