Welcome aboard, Montana!

The Mountain West Digital Library is growing like crazy, and we are so happy to announce the addition of a brand new state. Montana has become the sixth state to be represented in MWDL along with Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, and Hawaii.



Montana Historical Society Research Center Image

Thanks to the diligent efforts of our Metadata Librarian, Anna Neatrour, we have ingested 40 collections from over 15 different partners via the Montana Memory Project.

Another huge thank you to Jennifer Birnel at the Montana Memory Project for opening up MMP's wonderful collections to MWDL! Our staff is thrilled to make these historic collections more visible on a regional and national level.


15 new partners harvested via the Montana Memory Project

I've only just started looking at the collections and have already discovered these wonderful items:



Archival photograph from the University of Montana

 Ninth Annual Smoker, Montana Club. 1905

Her majesty Montana has a "come-hither" look. 1937 tourist advertisement



Come explore MMP's wonderful new collections in the Mountain West Digital Library and learn more about the history of "Big Sky Country".

The addition of Montana to the Mountain West Digital Library also means that our collections now cover a major swath of the Western United States from Canada to Mexico. Our updated partners map shows MWDL's geographic coverage with the addition of the Montana Memory Project's collections.

 

MWDL Partner Map 

Welcome aboard, Montana!  



DPLA Metadata Model Introduction now available

The folks at DPLA just published this handy guide to the DPLA Metadata Model. This blog post has more information. This is interesting reading if you would like to get an overview of some of the metadata aggregation issues DPLA deals with on a national level. MWDL deals with similar issues at a regional level, by using our Application Profile to articulate best practices and standardization before we send our metadata up to DPLA.

Training Opportunity: Making Sense of Data Free Online Class

One thing that came across my twitter feed today that I thought was interesting was this online course, Making Sense of Data offered through Google. According to the course description, the class will cover:

• Learn about the basics of data, including the structure and organization of data 
• Learn about the steps of the data process 
• Create and use Google Fusion Tables 
• Organize, summarize, and create charts from data 
•  Learn about different data analysis techniques and when to use them

This might be an interesting opportunity to learn about the possibilities for data wrangling through Google Fusion Tables!

The MWDL maps page has maps that were created in Google Fusion Tables and Google Maps. 

The class starts on March 18th, and registration is free.

In praise of Trello

As the outreach librarian for MWDL, I am a notorious list-maker. Not only does it help me keep track of my many tasks related to the Mountain West Digital Library but there is something so psychologically satisfying about crossing things off a list as proof of forward momentum.

Thanks to Cheryl Walters and the digital initiatives crew at USU, I have discovered my new favorite tool for making lists, Trello. Trello is the fastest, easiest project management tool I have ever used, especially for tracking projects that are relatively bound. This tool has been particularly useful to MWDL in recent weeks as we've been planning the MWDL Hubs Meeting which is taking place next Monday and Tuesday. Event planning is still new to the staff here at MWDL (myself included) and sharing a single Trello board for the event has been invaluable to our communication and organization.We can assign each other tasks, create checklists, and track our progress in a single location. Best of all, Trello allows us to move things from the "To Do" column to the "Doing" column to the "Done" column with satisfying swipes to the right. It is so much better than my usual checklists.

Our "Done" column on the right actually stretches down several pages

If you need simple project management for bound tasks, I highly recommend Trello. It does not replace long-term project management software like BaseCamp or JIRA. You won't find ways to create timelines or to combine projects into one location for long-term team planning. But it is the simplest and most effective tool I have ever used for short-term planning of discrete projects.

Thank you, Cheryl, for the recommendation!

Twitter! What is it Good for!?

Even though twitter has been around what seems like forever in Internet time, I sometimes find myself explaining why it is useful to non-twitter users. I have a couple twitter accounts that I use for different reasons.

• A personal twitter account (see if you can use your librarian super powers to find it). I joined twitter when I saw many of my online friends join it too! I use this account to tweet about non-library pursuits. This is a way for me to stay in touch with some of my friends, as well as follow along with tweets about my hobbies. A few years ago some of my friends and I launched a satirical twitter account that got a book deal, so I feel like my 15 minutes of Internet Fame also were due to twitter. 
• A professional twitter account - I was a bit hesitant about setting up a more professional twitter account as part of my job with MWDL, but I ended up finding it really useful. I use this account to take notes on some of the conferences I've been to in the form of live tweeting, which would probably be fairly obnoxious if I did it on my personal account where my followers aren't used to getting that type of information from me. I've followed many people who work in digital libraries and digital preservation on my professional twitter account, so I've found it to be really useful as a system to alert me to articles published in the subject areas I'm interested in as well as some of the more informal conversations about library issues that pop up frequently on twitter. I also like to follow the twitter accounts from digital libraries that are similar to MWDL, as well as MWDL partners. I went from worrying that having two regular twitter accounts would be too much, to being happy that I use both accounts for different purposes. 

One other reason why I like twitter is that it isn't Facebook! I think I only have the attention span to be fully engaged in one social media platform at a time, and I much prefer twitter over Facebook, just because I enjoy the short form of the updates, easily being able to retweet things I find interesting, and it is much easier to track conversations through twitter like this one about OrphanWorks or LAMfutures. 

Do you follow MWDL on twitter?

A Day In the Life of Your Metadata Librarian

I've noticed that sometimes my work comes in different types of waves. When I first started my position my major project was adding the great collections from the Arizona Memory Project. Since then I've been adding new collections here and there as they come in, as well as working on a reharvesting project with our collections from Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library.

I've recently been doing a great deal of metadata auditing, which means shortly after that's done we will be adding even more new collections to MWDL! Today we have new collections from Utah Valley University, and we'll soon be adding new collections from Brigham Young University, Montana Memory Project, University of Idaho, Northern Arizona University, Weber State University, Arizona Memory Project, and more!

When we add new collections to Primo, we also need to update our master tracking spreadsheet, update the php includes that make mwdl.org run so smoothly, and create new web pages for partners and collections. 

I'm about to take a class on XSLT and XQuery, which I'm hoping will help me become an even more efficient and useful metadata librarian! I'm hoping to come up with some procedures that will help me audit metadata against the MWDL application profile in a more comprehensive manner. Stay tuned for my adventures with XSLT and XQuery!