Before we all head off into our respective holiday breaks, we thought we’d take a look back at 2023 in review! It’s been a busy year for MWDL and we want to celebrate our successes.

We welcomed 21 new collections from Utah Valley University Libraries, Utah State University Libraries, Oregon Digital, Utah Department of Cultural & Community Engagement, and University of Utah Libraries. These ranged from medieval manuscripts to modern climber oral histories, from papers of community activists to histories of community gathering spots! This highlights the amazing diversity of content in our region.

In June, we launched our newly redesigned website with the help of the UU-Marriott Library UX & Web Development team. We couldn’t have done it without help from Leah Donaldson, Amanda Crittenden, and Alex McCausland. Kudos & thanks to all! Through our improved web analytics, we learned MWDL had 4,200 visitors from all over the world since June 1. We also had visitors referred from a number of external digital library projects: Omnia (a combined search of DPLA & Europeana items), Umbra Search (Black history portal via University of Minnesota – hits for UNR, UNLV, USU, UVU!), Digital Pasifik (a project of National Libraries of New Zealand & Australia that reuses DPLA-supplied content), and the Center for Knit & Crochet Digital Museum. 

Traffic to mwdl.org, June-December 2023

We held our first webinar since 2020 on December 14 when 3 members of the Digital Content Reuse Assessment Framework Toolkit research team introduced the D-CRAFT toolkit. You can view the recording in our media archive. Keep your eyes on our Events listings for upcoming learning opportunities, conference information, and more.

MWDL’s Governing Body completed a revision of the MWDL Guidelines to reconfigure the Governing Body. You can read more about the updates in our recent post.

Finally, we completed 4 quarterly DPLA harvests throughout the year. Several MWDL members participated in 3 of DPLA’s working groups (Rights, Outreach & Assessment, Wikimedia). 2023 saw the departure of several DPLA staff and we wish them all the best. We also participated in DPLA’s current strategic planning process and look forward to hearing more in early 2024 on that topic. With our final harvest in November, we made key metadata changes that will enable future MWDL participation in the DPLA-Wikimedia project with Oregon Digital piloting that effort.

We wish you all a safe, happy holiday season and look forward to 2024!