The Mountain West Digital Library (MWDL) is a centralized discovery portal for digital resources from libraries, archives, museums, government agencies, and historical societies in the Mountain West region of the United States. MWDL aggregates metadata from these memory institutions and provides online access to their cultural heritage and scholarly resources at http://mwdl.org. The MWDL provides services to a widespread digital library community and serves as the regional service hub to the

Digital Public Library of America The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is a US project aimed at providing public access to digital holdings in order to create a large-scale public digital library. It officially launched on April 18, 2013, after two and a half years of dev ...

for

Utah Utah ( , ) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. Utah is a landlocked U.S. state bordered to its east by Colorado, to its northeast by Wyoming, to its north by Idaho, to its south by Arizona, and to its ...

Nevada Nevada ( ; ) is a state in the Western region of the United States. It is bordered by Oregon to the northwest, Idaho to the northeast, California to the west, Arizona to the southeast, and Utah to the east. Nevada is the 7th-most extensive, ...

Idaho Idaho ( ) is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. To the north, it shares a small portion of the Canada–United States border with the province of British Columbia. It borders the states of Montana and W ...

Arizona Arizona ( ; nv, Hoozdo Hahoodzo ; ood, Alĭ ṣonak ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southwestern United States. It is the list of U.S. states and territories by area, 6th largest and the list of U.S. states and territories by population, 14 ...

Montana Montana () is a U.S. state, state in the Mountain states, Mountain West List of regions of the United States#Census Bureau-designated regions and divisions, division of the Western United States. It is bordered by Idaho to the west, North ...

, and

Hawaii Hawaii ( ; haw, Hawaii or ) is a state in the Western United States, located in the Pacific Ocean about from the U.S. mainland. It is the only U.S. state outside North America, the only state that is an archipelago, and the only ...

History

The Mountain West Digital Library was formed in 2001 as a program of the

Utah Academic Library Consortium The Utah Academic Library Consortium (UALC) is an organization of Utah libraries of not-for-profit educational and research universities and institutions.UALC Website: http://ualc.net/ UALC was established in 1971 to improve the availability and del ...

(UALC). Members of UALC created the Mountain West Digital Library to provide one-stop searching for users to access the digital collections of UALC institutions, including the

University of Utah The University of Utah (U of U, UofU, or simply The U) is a public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is the flagship institution of the Utah System of Higher Education. The university was established in 1850 as the University of D ...

Brigham Young University Brigham Young University (BYU, sometimes referred to colloquially as The Y) is a private research university in Provo, Utah. It was founded in 1875 by religious leader Brigham Young and is sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day ...

Utah State University Utah State University (USU or Utah State) is a public land-grant research university in Logan, Utah. It is accredited by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities. With nearly 20,000 students living on or near campus, USU is Uta ...

Southern Utah University Southern Utah University (SUU) is a public university in Cedar City, Utah. Founded in 1897 as a normal school, Southern Utah University now graduates over 1,800 students each year with baccalaureate and graduate degrees from its six colleges. ...

, and others. The MWDL has grown from its original Utah roots to offer services to memory institutions in Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, and Hawaii as well. (Hawaii is included because of

Brigham Young University-Hawaii Brigham may refer to: Places * Brigham, Cumbria, England * Brigham, East Riding of Yorkshire, England * Brigham City, Utah, USA * Brigham, Wisconsin, USA * Brigham, Quebec, Canada People * Brigham (surname), including a list of people with the ...

’s affiliation with the Provo, Utah-based

.) Founding goals also include developing standards and best practices for interoperability, sharing professional expertise and equipment, and assisting new partners beginning to digitize their archives and special collections. By leveraging the distributed MWDL network of hosting hubs and digitization centers, smaller memory institutions are able to work with larger ones to upload digital resources online, increasing the visibility of their collections and reducing wear and tear on fragile items. In 2013, the Mountain West Digital Library was selected as one of the six inaugural service hubs of the Digital Public Library of America, the national digital library of the United States. MWDL participates in the DPLA's Digital Hubs Pilot Project (2012-2015) and the Public Library Partnerships Project (2013-2015).

Organizational structure

The Mountain West Digital Library is a program of the

and is governed by the UALC Council of Directors. Funding for the program is provided by the Utah Academic Library Consortium, the Digital Public Library of America, and member organizations. The MWDL program and staff are hosted at the

J. Willard Marriott Library The J. Willard Marriott Library is the main academic library of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah. The university library has had multiple homes since the first University of Utah librarian was appointed in 1850. The current building ...

at the

Salt Lake City Salt Lake City (often shortened to Salt Lake and abbreviated as SLC) is the capital and most populous city of Utah, United States. It is the seat of Salt Lake County, the most populous county in Utah. With a population of 200,133 in 2020, th ...

, which provides in-kind support such as office space, equipment, meeting space, financial management services, human resources services, and use of Marriott Library’s license for Primo by

Ex Libris Ex Libris may refer to: *An Ex Libris (bookplate), a label affixed to a book to indicate ownership * Ex Libris (band), a Dutch metal band * Ex Libris (bookshop), a Swiss retail company * "Ex Libris" (''Charmed''), a 2000 episode of the television ...

, the integrated discovery system that accomplishes metadata harvesting and provides the search portal. The Mountain West Digital Library operates as a hub-and-spoke distributed networked organization, with three tiers. Thirty regional “hosting hubs” manage digital asset management system repositories and host 699 digital collections from 164 collection partners, including libraries, archives, museums, government agencies, and historical societies. Larger MWDL hosting hubs include the Utah State Archives, University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Library, Brigham Young University Harold B. Lee Library, the Utah State Library, the Arizona Memory Project, University of Nevada Reno Libraries, and the Montana Memory Project. At the center of the organizational structure is the database and portal of the Mountain West Digital Library, which aggregates metadata from the hosting hubs on a regular basis. The responsibilities of collection partners, hosting hubs, and MWDL staff are described in the Mountain West Digital Library Partnership Agreement. Since 2013, MWDL has received funding from the Digital Public Library of America, under awards to the DPLA from the

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), a merging of the William H. Gates Foundation and the Gates Learning Foundation, is an American private foundation founded by Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates. Based in Seattle, Washington, it w ...

, the

John S. and James L. Knight Foundation The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, also known as the Knight Foundation, is an American non-profit foundation that provides grants for journalism, communities, and the arts. The organization was founded as the Knight Memorial Education ...

, the

Institute for Museum and Library Services The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is an independent agency of the United States federal government established in 1996. It is the main source of federal support for libraries and museums within the United States, having the mis ...

, and the

National Endowment for the Humanities The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the U.S. government, established by thNational Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965(), dedicated to supporting research, education, preserv ...

. MWDL staff work closely with DPLA staff to help build out the national network of hubs and to promote the adoption of common practices and standards.

Collections

The Mountain West Digital Library includes digital collections on regional and national topics such as Westward migration, mining, and

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

. The portal is of particular interest to users researching the

American West The Western United States (also called the American West, the Far West, and the West) is the region comprising the westernmost states of the United States. As American settlement in the U.S. expanded westward, the meaning of the term ''the Wes ...

, pioneer history, and

Mormon Mormons are a religious and cultural group related to Mormonism, the principal branch of the Latter Day Saint movement started by Joseph Smith in upstate New York during the 1820s. After Smith's death in 1844, the movement split into seve ...

history. Materials in the Mountain West Digital Library include historical photographs, books, maps, scholarly documents, birth and death records, videos, and sound recordings. The MWDL uses an application profile of the

Dublin Core 220px, Logo image of DCMI, which formulates Dublin Core The Dublin Core, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), is a set of fifteen "core" elements (properties) for describing resources. This fifteen-element Dublin Core has ...

metadata schema so that items in MWDL collections can be searched by author, title, date, subject, geography, and resource type.MWDL Dublin Core Application Profile, version 2.0 http://mwdl.org/docs/MWDL_DC_Profile_Version_2.0.pdf

References

{{reflist, 2 American digital libraries