Digital resources are widely used in our modern society. However, we are facing fundamental problems to maintain and preserve digital resources over time. Several standard methods for preserving digital resources have been developed and are in use. It is widely recognized that metadata is one of the most important components for digital archiving and preservation. There are many metadata standards for archiving and preservation of digital resources, where each standard has its own feature in accordance with its primary application. This means that each schema has to be appropriately selected and tailored in accordance with a particular application. And, in some cases, those schemas are combined in a larger frame work and container metadata such as the DCMI application framework and METS. There are many metadata standards for archives of digital resources. We used the following metadata standards in this study for the feature analysis me metadata standards - AGLS Metadata which is defined to improve search of both digital resources and non-digital resources, ISAD(G) which is a commonly used standard for archives, EAD which is well used for digital archives, OAIS which defines a metadata framework for preserving digital objects, and PREMIS which is designed primarily for preservation of digital resources. In addition, we extracted attributes from the decision tree defined for digital preservation process by Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) and compared the set of attributes with these metadata standards. This paper shows the features of these metadata standards obtained through the feature analysis based on the records lifecycle model. The features are shown in a single frame work which makes it easy to relate the tasks in the lifecycle to metadata elements of these standards. As a result of the detailed analysis of the metadata elements, we clarified the features of the standards from the viewpoint of relationships between the elements and the lifecycle stages. Mapping between metadata schemas is often required in the long-term preservation process because different schemes are used in the records lifecycle. Therefore, it is crucial to build a unified framework to enhance interoperability of these schemes. This study presents a basis for the interoperability of different metadata schemas used in digital archiving and preservation.