The primary goal of the ARIADNE project, supported by the European Commission, is to foster share and reuse of digital pedagogical material. For this purpose, a Europe-wide repository of reusable pedagogical documents, called the Knowledge Pool System (KPS) has been set up. One of the key features of the KPS is the underlying metadata specification, which has been used in extensive experiments. The ARIADNE metadata scheme includes both mandatory and optional elements, and is at the basis of the emerging Learning Objects Metadata standard, developed by the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee. This article presents the ARIADNE metadata scheme and discusses ARIADNE tools developed to support metadata authoring and indexing, database querying, and course development activities. A discussion of the ARIADNE community's experience is also presented.