Audiovisual resources are expanding rapidly these days. Large amounts of these complicated materials could lead to serious problems in resource description, representation and organization. Supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China, the project entitled Innovative Study on Audiovisual Metadata and its Retrieval has been conducted since 2002. During the preparation phase, the status ofaudiovisual information resources and their characteristics were analyzed; general users' and managers' needs were examined, and existing metadata methods and projects on audiovisual resources were investigated and explored. Based on those constructive and helpful findings, the Audiovisual Metadata Set was developed. This paper introduces the principles of the Set’s design and provides an overview of its content. The work is still in progress and the discussions presented here are preliminary in nature. A great many tasks are foreseen and will need to be undertaken, to establish this Set.