This work analyses the historic process that led to the usage of metadata in records of repositories whilst preserving doctoral dissertations. There is a special emphasis on old and new repository of Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences University of Zagreb – Darhiv and Odraz. Both repositories emphasise important information about doctoral dissertations, especially when compared to traditional format MARC 21. The work gives a complete analysis of metadata and their record structure with various examples. Open access as well as its development that led to origin of digital repositories is being explained. Digital repositories have an important role in informing scientists about new results from scientific works and secure access and quality of the works. The doctoral dissertations are very important scientific works and are a part of the so-called grey literature. The cataloging differences between the traditional format MARC 21 and the rules of repositories are being examined. The examples show metadata connected to the dissertations and are being compared to the MARC 21 fields, as well as to each other. The similarities and differences are shown in the table sheets to provide a look into processing of doctoral dissertations.