Mountain West Digital Library

Last updated
Mountain West Digital Library
MWDL Black Simple Logo.png
Location Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
Type Digital library
Established2001
Other information
DirectorTeresa Hebron
Employees4
Website http://mwdl.org

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. [1] 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 for Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, Montana, and Hawaii. [2] [3]

Contents

History

The Mountain West Digital Library was formed in 2001 as a program of the Utah Academic Library Consortium (UALC). [4] 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, Brigham Young University, Utah State University, Southern Utah University, and others. [5] 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’s affiliation with the Provo, Utah-based Brigham Young University.)

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. [6] 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 Utah Academic Library Consortium 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 at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah, [7] 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, 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. [8]

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 John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. 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. The portal is of particular interest to users researching the American West, pioneer history, and Mormon history.

Materials in the Mountain West Digital Library include historical photographs, books, maps, scholarly documents, birth and death records, videos, and sound recordings. [9] The MWDL uses an application profile of the Dublin Core metadata schema so that items in MWDL collections can be searched by author, title, date, subject, geography, and resource type. [10]

Related Research Articles

The space-grant colleges are educational institutions in the United States that comprise a network of fifty-three consortia formed for the purpose of outer space-related research. Each consortium is based in one of the fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, or Guam, and each consists of multiple independent space-grant institutions, with one of the institutions acting as lead.

Alf Marinius Engen was a Norwegian-American skier. He set several ski jumping world records during the 1930s and helped establish numerous ski areas in the Western United States. Engen is best known for his ski school at Alta in Utah and as the pioneer of powder skiing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J. Willard Marriott Library</span> Library at the University of Utah

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 was opened in 1968 and named for J. Willard Marriott, founder of Marriott International, in 1969. After two major renovations, the building is more than 500,000 square feet (46,000 m2) and houses more than 4.5 million volumes. The University of Utah Press and Red Butte Press are divisions of the Marriott Library.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marriott Center</span> College basketball arena in Provo, Utah, United States

The Marriott Center is a multi-purpose arena in the western United States, located on the campus of Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah. It is home to the BYU Cougars men's and women's basketball teams. The seating capacity for basketball games at the Marriott Center is officially 17,978. It is the largest basketball arena in the Big 12 Conference and is among the largest on-campus basketball arenas in the nation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J. Willard Marriott</span> American hotel founder

John Willard Marriott Sr. was an American entrepreneur and businessman. He was the founder of the Marriott Corporation, the parent company of the world's largest hospitality, hotel chains, and food services companies. The Marriott company rose from a small root beer stand in Washington, D.C., in 1927 to a chain of family restaurants by 1932, to its first motel in 1957. By the time he died in 1985, the Marriott company operated 1,400 restaurants and 143 hotels and resorts worldwide, including two theme parks, earned US$4.5 billion in revenue annually with 154,600 employees. The company's interests also extended to a line of cruise ships.

The Utah Pride Center (UPC) is a tax-exempt nonprofit organization in Salt Lake City. It provides services, events and activities to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people in Utah. The center manages annual and ongoing projects including the Utah Pride Festival.

The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the University of California in 1997. Under the leadership of then UC President Richard C. Atkinson, the CDL's original mission was to forge a better system for scholarly information management and improved support for teaching and research. In collaboration with the ten University of California Libraries and other partners, CDL assembled one of the world's largest digital research libraries. CDL facilitates the licensing of online materials and develops shared services used throughout the UC system. Building on the foundations of the Melvyl Catalog, CDL has developed one of the largest online library catalogs in the country and works in partnership with the UC campuses to bring the treasures of California's libraries, museums, and cultural heritage organizations to the world. CDL continues to explore how services such as digital curation, scholarly publishing, archiving and preservation support research throughout the information lifecycle.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Levi E. Young</span> Latter-day Saint mission president and seventy

Levi Edgar Young was a general authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was one of the seven presidents of the Seventy from 1909 until his death. He has been associated with the release of the 1832 account of Joseph Smith's First Vision, which was previously not widely known. Aside from his service in the Seventy, Young served as president of various LDS Church missions. Young received a master's degree from Columbia University in history and was a professor of history at the University of Utah.

William Grant Bagley was a historian specializing in the history of the Western United States and the American Old West. Bagley wrote about the fur trade, overland emigration, American Indians, military history, frontier violence, railroads, mining, and Utah and the Mormons.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Washakie, Utah</span> Ghost town in Utah, United States

Washakie is a ghost town in far northern Box Elder County, Utah, United States. Lying some 3 miles (4.8 km) southeast of Portage, it was established in 1880 by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for the settlement of the Northwestern Shoshone. The Washakie Indian Farm was home to the main body of this Native American band through most of the 20th century. By the mid-1970s, Washakie's residents were gone and the property sold to a private ranching operation. Today the tribal reservation consists of a small tract containing the Washakie cemetery, and the tribe is seeking to acquire more of the surrounding land. The old LDS chapel in Washakie is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joseph T. Kingsbury</span>

Joseph Thomas Kingsbury was Acting President of the University of Deseret, now known as the University of Utah, from 1892 to 1894. In 1894 he was replaced by James E. Talmage, and then in 1897, was appointed President of the university. He held that position until he resigned because of a campus controversy in 1916. In spite of his resignation, Kingsbury's combined service as president of the university was longer than any other since.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ronald W. Walker</span> American historian (1939 – 2016)

Ronald Warren Walker was an American historian of the Latter Day Saint movement and a professor at Brigham Young University (BYU) and president of the Mormon History Association. His work, acclaimed by the Mormon History Association, dealt with the Godbeites, the Utah War, and the Mountain Meadows Massacre, among other topics.

The Western Waters Digital Library (WWDL) provides free public access to digital collections of significant primary and secondary resources on water in the western United States. These collections have been made available by research libraries other academic and institutional partners.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital Public Library of America</span> US digital library project

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 development.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Montana State University Library</span> American academic library

The Montana State University Library (MSU Library) is the academic library of Montana State University, Montana's land-grant university, in Bozeman, Montana, United States. It is the flagship library for all of the Montana State University System's campuses. In 1978, the library was named the Roland R. Renne Library to honor the sixth president of the university. The library supports the research and information needs of Montana's students, faculty, and the Montana Extension Service.

The Utah Academic Library Consortium (UALC) is an organization of Utah libraries of not-for-profit educational and research universities and institutions. UALC was established in 1971 to improve the availability and delivery of information services to the higher education community and the State of Utah. It was formed to maximize state resources, foster research, and advocate for excellent library resources.

The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) is a standardized test consortium. It creates Common Core State Standards-aligned tests to be used in several states. It uses automated essay scoring. Its counterpart in the effort to become a leading multi-state test provider is the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Samvera</span>

Samvera, originally known as Hydra, is an open-source digital repository software product. Samvera main components are Fedora Commons, Solr, Blacklight, and HydraHead. Each Samvera implementation is called a "head".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brigham D. Madsen</span> American historian (1914-2010)

Brigham Dwaine Madsen was a historian of indigenous peoples of the American West, of the people of Utah and surrounding states, and of Mormonism. He was a professor at the University of Utah.

Richard Langton Reese was an environmental activist who founded the Greater Yellowstone Coalition and an alpinist who participated in the North Face Grand Teton rescue in 1967.

References

  1. "Mountain West Digital Library homepage" http://mwdl.org
  2. Meet the Hubs!: Mountain West Digital Library on the DPLA website http://dp.la/info/2013/02/04/meet-the-hubs-mountain-west-digital-library/
  3. What Is the DPLA? Library Journal, April 8, 2013 http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/04/future-of-libraries/whats-is-the-dpla/
  4. Utah Academic Library Consortium homepage http://www.ualc.net/
  5. Partnering with the Mountain West Digital Library Webinar https://video.utah.edu/media/t/0_86ktw014
  6. Meet the Hubs!: Mountain West Digital Library on the DPLA website http://dp.la/info/2013/02/04/meet-the-hubs-mountain-west-digital-library/
  7. J Willard Marriott Library Digital Library webpage http://www.lib.utah.edu/collections/digital-library.php
  8. Mountain West Digital Library Partnership Agreement http://mwdl.org/docs/MWDL_Partnership_Agreement_ver12_2008-03-14.pdf
  9. About the Mountain West Digital Library Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6t2Hynmd0c
  10. MWDL Dublin Core Application Profile, version 2.0 http://mwdl.org/docs/MWDL_DC_Profile_Version_2.0.pdf