To advocate open science and knowledge development, the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre (SAC) recognizes the significance of collocation of research outputs funded by the SAC for the public use. The SAC’s Research Database (http://www.sac.or.th/databases/sac-research/index.php) was developed and launched in March 2019 to provide free access to digital full-text research outputs under the creative common license (CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0). This database was designed for database administratorsSAC’s staffs and the general publicpublic by taking usability into account. Therefore, the usability and interoperability are taken into consideration when selecting the metadata scheme. The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set was chosen with some modified element refinements for the SAC’s Research Database. This paper presents the lesson learned from the development of the research database. Ultimately, this paper may shed some light on the application of metadata usage from the anthropology researchers to public users in the field of anthropology.