This paper introduces the CLARIN Component Metadata Infrastructure (CMDI) Best Practices guide as currently developed by the CMDI and Metadata Curation Task Forces. This guide, combined with the technical specification of CMDI 1.2, will become a useful resource in creating high quality metadata records that function well in the CLARIN infrastructure. Thus, the scope of the best practices goes beyond purely schematic constraints and ranges from modelling guidelines, e.g. “prefer elements over attributes”, to rather low-level technical guidelines, e.g. “use the UTF-8 encoding for your records”, and includes steps to incorporate in workflows, e.g. “use the CLARIN Curation Module to assess the quality of records”. This paper actively solicits feedback on a public draft version (CE-2017-1076) for the first official version of the guide.