diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index c7acce72..7dff3189 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -1,2 +1,7 @@
 # cbioportal-core
-Legacy cBioPortal Core
+Legacy cBioPortal Core. Although many of the Java classes here are still in use by the main codebase and the `metaImport.py` Python scripts are still used for importing, we decided to move them all here for deprecating in the future once we have come up with a good plan for replacing them.
+
+This repo contains:
+
+- many old Java classes for interacting with the database
+- The `metaImport.py` Python script used for importing