The Data Refuge Data Catalog archives federal climate and environmental data. It provides historical snapshots of datasets released on government data portals, which are vulnerable to deletion. Yet the metadata associated with these Data Refuge records have been minimal, and their relationship with the source records have not been clearly defined. To address this, we investigated crosswalking solutions, improved metadata of target datasets, customized an extensible schema, standardized tagging with controlled vocabulary, and documented workflow for future-phase implementation. The results improve trustworthiness and interoperability, facilitate more seamless data discovery and retrieval, and meet the needs of both archivists and researchers.