As noted above, most proprietary geophysics software packages maintain some record of the geophysics metadata but when exporting to preservation formats, this may be lost and geophysics metadata have to be created to capture this information. Similarly, many contractors and academic practitioners use databases to store information about their projects. This can be exported to form the core of the project metadata to be augmented with further information. Comprehensive documentation provides a comprehensive overview of possible geophysics and project metadata. Subsets of documentation then lists subsets of this list of metadata that are used in different archiving schemes.

There is currently no database standard to store these metadata in and it is therefore recommended to create a spreadsheet, text document or XML file. It should be an aspiration of the archaeological geophysics community to develop an XML schema that could capture all this.