MWDL's Year in Review!

What a year it's been! We started the year off big in January by welcoming Teresa K. Hebron as our fantastic new Metadata Librarian. Over the next several months we bade farewell to Avalon Snell and Jon Wiggins, and said hello to Arash Tadjiki and Keegan Dohm who became the new Web Software Developer and Metadata Assistant. We have formed taskforces, hosted conferences, traveled the world, seen usage globally, transferred to the new website, welcomed new members, and ingested thousands and thousands of new records.

On that last note, we are proud to announce...

MWDL Went Platinum this Year! 

That’s right, we crossed the 1 million record threshold. With the recent completion of DPLA's November harvest, we also have a 1 million-plus item representation in DPLA as well! 

The illustrious platinum record fictitiously awarded to MWDL after reaching 1 million records.

We’d like to thank our institutional members for their strong support and diverse content, and all our new and old team members who have striven to make Mountain West Digital Library the best it could be. We'd also like to give a special shout-out to all the people using MWDL! Check out their most popular searches for 2018 in the wordcloud below.

This wordcloud shows the top 25 search terms on mwdl.org during 2018.

With so much new content (and exciting outreach programs in the works), the 2019 wordcloud may take on a totally different shape.

We had a huge meeting over the internet!

Just last week, on Dec 14^th, we held the MWDL Winter Hubs meeting. The meeting minutes are located here. Some highlights include info on the recent DPLA updates and Changes, lightning quick institutional updates, and status updates from Bulk Digitization (Specifications and metadata), Outreach, MAP revision, and Digital Preservation taskforces. For those interested, a Zoom recording is available as well.  

And a real-world conference in July!

J. Willard Marriott Library at University of Utah hosted the MWDL Summer Conference on July 10-11. It was wonderful seeing so many people from members and the general community for two packed days of presentations, updates, bingo, library tours and networking. 

In case you weren't able to join us, the proceedings will be online soon and we look forward to seeing you at the next meeting!

Shiny new promotional materials!

The front (left) and back (right) of MWDL's newest postcard.

Keegan Dohm, our Metadata Assistant, recently designed a striking new postcard for our promotional materials. With the new design and added features like space for writing, we think it turned out great! Of course, we've also added the new features to the backs of our old post cards. Feel free to let us know what you think and if you want to use this or other media, you can find them at the bottom of our get involved page.

Starting Off 2019 in Style!

Our student employees Arash Tadjiki and Keegan Dohm are working to set up a new MWDL Blog and Publishing site to be unveiled in 2019. The publishing portion of the site will host the publications presented at this year's summer conference and the blog section will replace this one. So get ready for a sleeker blog site with a totally new slate of posts and outreach!

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?