Developing collection-level surveys to expose hidden collections in special collections and archives departments within ARL libraries has received a great deal of scholarly attention in the recent years. Numerous standards have been explored, and each has its strengths and weaknesses. This paper summarizes some of the major initiatives in collection-level surveys, descriptions, and preliminary records. A comparison of metadata structures is used to build a preliminary record model that provides a standard description that is easily adapted to various institutions and all formats. This preliminary record model is applied to special collections materials at the University of Colorado at Boulder as a test case, and further areas of research are discussed.