A new listserve for MWDL partners

To foster more communication among the collection partners of the Mountain West Digital Library, we are launching a new listserve today.  This listserve, MWDL-News, will include announcements about new services and new functionality on our search portal at http://mwdl.org, as well as helpful information about managing digital collections in CONTENTdm and other digital assets management systems.  I anticipate that we will have announcements and news items several times a month.  This will be a great way to share digitization stories and expertise across the region. 

Many of you already know that MWDL partners span the Mountain West.  There are now almost 60 partnering organizations listed at http://mwdl.org/aboutPartners.php, including libraries, archives, museums, parks, historical societies, and government departments and agencies. What we all share in common is the challenge to digitize and make available the cultural heritage of the West – its photographs, artworks, maps, oral histories, sounds, videos, scholarly works, and historical documents. So far, we have over 650,000 such digital resources available through our network of 15 regional repositories, and we are adding new collections every month. I invite all our partners to grow with MWDL and to share what you have learned about digital curation of these valuable resources, while also learning from others along the way.

If there is someone from your organization who should be on this list, please drop me a line at sandra.mcintyre@utah.edu.  I look forward to hearing your stories and learning how the Mountain West Digital Library can serve you better!

--Sandra McIntyre, Program Director

Visit from Dan Harbeke of Union Pacific Foundation

Thanks to the generosity of the Union Pacific Foundation, the Mountain West Digital Library has been able to engage an intern, Nick Hayen, for the 2011-2012 academic year.  Nick has caught on quickly about how MWDL operates, and he is working on several projects to improve the user experience of the MWDL portal. He is also tackling numerous tasks related to search engine optimization, to improve the access and ranking of MWDL’s valuable resources in Google and other search engines. We were pleased to be able to thank Dan Harbeke, Public Affairs Director for UP Foundation, in person recently when he visited the Marriott Library at the University of Utah.  Here are Nick and Dan in front of the study alcove on Level 1, which was made possible by another donation from the UP Foundation.

Finding Aids Portal

We are pleased to announce a new portal page on the Mountain West Digital Library, called “Encoded Archival Description (EAD) Finding Aids Portal,” at http://mwdl.org/ead_portal.php. This page provides new functionality for searching finding aids to materials from special collections and archives in the Mountain West.

• Users can search on the dozens of browse topics listed.
• Users can search all finding aids on any keyword or term of their choice by typing it in a search box on the page.
• Users can browse all finding aids by material type.
• Users can browse all finding aids by contributing partner library or archive.

As before, users can also discover finding aids in the course of other searches in MWDL. They can limit their search results by finding aid at any time (or by any other resource type if they wish to exclude finding aids).

MWDL intern Nick Hayen worked with Sandra McIntyre on creating this page. For the PHP programming, we are grateful for the time contributed by Alan Witkowski at the University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Library, one of our EAD partners. The new EAD portal page is currently "featured" on the MWDL home page at http://mwdl.org.

MWDL intern Nick Hayen

The Mountain West Digital Library has a new staff member, thanks to the generosity of the Union Pacific Foundation and the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah.  

Nick Hayen came to the University of Utah last fall as a first year graduate student working towards a Master’s degree in History, focusing on the history of the modern Middle East.  After completing a Bachelor of Arts Degree in History at South Dakota State University, Nick was drawn to further his studies in Utah after seeing the beautiful Wasatch Mountains and the Marriott Library’s extensive Middle East collection. Nick’s position with the Mountain West Digital Library is provided through funding from the Union Pacific Foundation and his internship focus is to improve the MWDL portal’s usability for students and faculty members. Nick will be working alongside program director Sandra McIntyre half-time through mid-May. Welcome, Nick!

MWDL in the news

The latest issue  of the ACRL publication College & Research Libraries News has included a favorable review of the Mountain West Digital Library in its “Internet Reviews” department. What a nice way to end the year!

http://crln.acrl.org/content/72/11/701.full#article-title-3

We have even more resources than the review reported.  We have harvested records for more than 650,000 resources in 337 digital collections from 14 regional repositories.  Thanks to all our partners for another year of growth in sharing valuable resources about the Mountain West!

Update on migration to new MWDL portal

The members of the Digitization Committee of the Utah Academic Library Consortium are conducting their review of the beta site for the Mountain West Digital Library in Ex Libris Primo. Curious about the types of issues they are noting? Anyone can access the list at MWDL Primo Issues and take a look. MWDL intern Trisha Hansen has set up a SurveyMonkey survey of Committee members about key aspects of the new portal, and those results will be available in the aggregate next week. Trisha is also working on the final touches for her in-person usability tests, which she will conduct with students and genealogists in the next few weeks at labs at both University of Utah and Brigham Young University. Meanwhile, Tracy Medley and the Primo team at UU-Marriott Library are working out various fine points about the code and display of the metadata. The beta site is available for the public to use, linked from the regular MWDL home page that still has the "old" search portal in PKP Open Archives Harvester. Searches are much faster in the new portal, and we have thousands more resources available. Wish us luck in making it to the finish!

"Soft-launch" of MWDL Primo

We have opened up public access to the beta site for the Primo search portal, linked from the Mountain West Digital Library home page. After two weeks of beta testing by the UALC Digitization Committee, there are only a few issues that remain to be resolved by the Primo team. The database available through PKP Open Archives Harvester for MWDL is seriously outdated -- the last harvest was in June 2010 -- and so it seemed like time to share the wealth of new resources and new functionality available through the beta Primo site. It will be interesting to see what comments we get about the new features and the enhanced quality of the metadata. (UALC Digitization Committee members, please complete the beta testers survey in SurveyMonkey if you haven't already. The address is in the UALC-DIGIT listserve reminder message sent out today.)

Usability Testing Project

We are fortunate to have Trisha Hansen interning this winter/spring with the Mountain West Digital Library. Trisha is a graduate student in the Emporia State University program and will earn her MLIS at the end of 2011.  Last fall, she approached Kenning Arlitsch and Sandra McIntyre about how she could learn more about digital libraries, and what has resulted is her extensive work on a usability testing project for MWDL, for which she will receive practicum credit at Emporia State.

This is valuable work, especially given the current migration to Ex Libris Primo for our search portal, and we are grateful that Trisha has contributed her considerable energies and enthusiasm toward it!  Many thanks also go to the University of Utah Marriott Library for agreeing to host Trisha in its IT Department, to Amanda Crittenden there for providing use of the Marriott's usability testing lab, and to Scott Eldredge and Brian Roberts at Brigham Young University Lee Library for providing a second usability lab and test subjects at BYU.

For more information on Trisha's project, see her "Mountain West Digital Library Usability Testing Project Plan" at http://mwdl.org/public/mwdl/MWDL_Usability_Testing_Project_Plan_v4.pdf. In it she discusses usability testing for digital libraries and explains why she chose three testing protocols -- heuristics evaluation, think-aloud testing, and feedback survey -- to delve into who our users are and how they are using MWDL. Please feel free to contact Trisha directly at trisha.hansen@utah.edu with any comments or questions about this plan. She will be delivering an interim report to us at the Digitization Committee spring meeting on April 27 and a final written analysis of her results this summer. In the meantime, please check this blog for developments!

Hosting hubs to test search engine optimization for digital repositories

Thanks again to all of you who responded to the invitation to be included in testing the strategies and tools for search engine optimization for digital repositories.  Here is the updated list of who will be involved: 

• Gina Strack at the Utah State Archives
• Catherine McIntyre at Utah Valley University Library
• Nancy Lombardo at Eccles Health Sciences Library, University of Utah
• Kristen Jensen at Utah Department of Community and Culture 
• Cory Lampert at University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries
• Glee Willis at University of Nevada, Reno Libraries
• Jamie Weeks at Weber State University, Stewart Library
• Anne Morrow at Marriott Library, University of Utah

If there are others who would like to be involved, now or later, please let Sandra McIntyre (sandra.mcintyre@utah.edu) know of your interest.  Thanks.

Beta site in Primo

An internal review of the Mountain West Digital Library's new beta site in Ex Libris Primo was announced on December 15, 2010, and will be underway through the beginning of 2011. During this metadata-oriented review period, collection managers throughout the MWDL network will examine their collections' metadata as it appears in the new site and comment on the normalization rules that have been customized for MWDL-harvested collections.

Primo is a leader among the current generation of integrated discovery tools -- a one-stop discovery and delivery solution. Ex Libris' goal with Primo is to "bridge the gap between current library systems and today's user expectations" and to help libraries "reclaim their position as a preferred source for information discovery."

The Mountain West Digital Library is a flagship program of the Utah Academic Library Consortium, with over 350 collections from more than 50 partner organizations, including higher education libraries, museums, historical societies, archives, public libraries, state agencies, counties, and municipalities. MWDL provides free access to hundreds of thousands of digitized resources about the Mountain West region of the United States, including many valuable historical and cultural heritage materials.