User:Howardgershon/MountainWestDigitalLibrary

Mountain West Digital Library
The Mountain West Digital Library (MWDL) is a web portal for digital resources from libraries, archives, museums, government agencies, and historical societies in the Mountain West region of the United States. Unlike traditional digital libraries, the Mountain West Digital Library aggregates metadata from 160 different institutions and provides online access to almost 900,000 historic resources. As of 2013, the Mountain West Digital Library is the regional service hub to the Digital Public Library of America for Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Montana, Idaho, and Hawaii.

History
The Mountain West Digital Library was formed in 2001 as a program of the Utah Academic Library Consortium. Members of UALC created the Mountain West Digital Library to provide a central search portal for users to access the digital collections of UALC institutions – including the University of Utah, Brigham Young University, Utah State University, and others – in one place rather than searching each institution’s digital collections separately.

In addition to ease of search, the purpose of the Mountain West Digital Library was to facilitate standards development between UALC institutions, share professional expertise, and help smaller institutions in the region digitize their historic materials. By leveraging the Mountain West Digital Library network, smaller memory institutions work with larger institutions to get materials online to increase the visibility of their collections and reduce wear and tear on fragile items.

In 2013, the Mountain West Digital Library was selected as one of the six inaugural service hubs for the Digital Public Library of America, the United State’s first national digital library. Due to its role as a service hub for DPLA, the Mountain West Digital Library has grown from its original Utah roots to expand its services to memory institutions in Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, and Hawaii. Though not technically a part of the Mountain West region, Hawaii is included because of BYU-Hawaii’s affiliation with the Provo-based Brigham Young University.

The offices of the Mountain West Digital Library are located at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Organizational Structure
The Mountain West Digital Library started as a program of the Utah Academic Library Consortium and has received funding from UALC since 2001. Since 2013, MWDL has received additional funding from the Digital Public Library of America, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The J. Willard Marriott Library provides in-kind support such as office space, technology support, and use of Marriott Library’s search and discovery software, Ex Libris Primo.

The Mountain West Digital Library operates as a three-tiered hub and spoke model organization. At the center of the organizational structure is the Mountain West Digital Library, which aggregates metadata from 30 different “hubs” or digital asset management systems. The 30 hubs host collections from 160 different partner organizations, which include libraries, archives, museums, government agencies, and historical societies. Larger MWDL hubs include University of Utah, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Brigham Young University. The responsibilities of partners, hubs, and MWDL are laid out in the MWDL Partnership Agreement.

Collections
The Mountain West Digital Library includes 683 digital collections on regional and national topics such as Westward migration and World War II. Although MWDL collections cover a broad base of topics, 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 historic photographs, books, maps, scholarly documents, birth and death records, videos, and sound recordings. The Mountain West Digital Library uses a modified Dublin Core metadata standard so that items in MWDL collections can be searched by author, title, date, subject, geography, and resource type.