"[A]n essential resource for any student of the American West."
- Review of MWDL in College & Research Libraries News, December 2011

The Mountain West Digital Library is a portal to digital resources from universities, colleges, public libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies in Utah, Nevada, Idaho, and Hawaii. The MWDL has these goals:

• Create a distributed digital repository of significant, rare, and/or unique resources from the libraries, archives, and other cultural heritage institutions of the Mountain West region.
• Provide a public portal accessing digital collections about the Mountain West for the benefit of MWDL partners, the scholarly community at large, and the general public.
• Expand the digital library vision and environment for the Mountain West region, and support the digital library development efforts of Collections Partners, including colleges, universities, public libraries, school libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, municipalities, counties, state agencies, and other entities as approved by the UALC Council.

Partners

Please see the "Partners" page of this site for a list of all the organizations that contribute to the Mountain West Digital Library and make it work.

Collections

See the "Collections" list of the hundreds of digital collections that are available for search in the Mountain West Digital Library.

Policies and Guidelines

• Mountain West Digital Library Partnership Agreement (pdf)
• Mountain West Digital Library Dublin Core Application Profile, Version 2.0, 20 July 2011 (pdf) - supersedes the 2006 Metadata Guidelines for the Mountain West Digital Library and the CDP Dublin Core Metadata Best Practices for use with metadata harvested into the MWDL
• General Guidelines for Digital Metadata (accompanies the Application Profile)
• BCR's CDP Digital Imaging Best Practices Version 2.0 (pdf)
• MWDL Digitization Price List 2008 (pdf)
• Setting Up a Repository for Harvest

Sponsorship

The Mountain West Digital Library is a program of the Utah Academic Library Consortium, as part of its goal to improve the availability and delivery of library and information services. Support comes from these sources:

• Utah Academic Library Consortium
• Digital Public Library of America sub-awards for participation in the Digital Hubs Pilot Project, 2012-2014, from these funding sources:
• John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
• National Endowment for the Humanities
• Institute of Museum and Library Services funding under the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by the Utah State Library for original server set-up in 2001
• Contributed workspace and systems support from the University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Library
• Volunteer assistance from librarians, archivists, and curators at MWDL Partner institutions