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! 

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.

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!

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.

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!