Wednesday, February 22, 2012

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.

Friday, February 3, 2012

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.