A double special issue on two conferences: The 2009 Metadata and Semantics Research conference and the 2009 African Digital Scholarship and Curation Conference. The MTSR conference series is focused on theoretical and practical aspects of metadata research in a broad sense: models, languages, standards and applications among other aspects, and also on the application of Semantic Web technologies or any other kind of advanced metadata expression language to Web applications. The purpose of the 2nd ADSCC was to identify opportunities, strategies and practical examples for new forms of research and scholarship, and for the management of the digital content of these activities by academics, researchers, scientists, information professionals and IT experts.