Welcome to MWDL’s new website! We kept the same domain (mwdl.org) but it’s like we have brand new furniture in our web-based house! Our previous custom site design was launched in early 2018 and we migrated to a WordPress backend this spring. Whew! We couldn’t have done any of this without the work of University of Utah, Marriott Library’s User Experience & Web Development team and want to give a HUGE thanks to Amanda, Leah & Alex for all their work since January.

Here’s a brief introduction to some of our new features.

Starting right from the top on our homepage, our search tool is hard to miss. We want to emphasize our regional combined search portal, and you can jump straight in or perform an Advanced Search.

Moving down the page, we have upcoming Events and our Twitter feed. Be sure to check out both for current goings-on!

We made the most changes to our Collection landing pages. This area contains the bulk of our site’s content and we wanted to make it easier to find our many amazing collections! We added:

1. A search tool for collection titles and descriptions
2. An alpha-numeric filter for collection titles
3. A partner filter – you can select multiple options and search by name! View all MWDL partners here.
4. Topics – we’re still building this feature out, but we’ll soon have a topic filter as well. Want to suggest a topic? Let us know!
5. Taking the 1918 Flu Pandemic Newspapers collection as an example, we’ve improved the collection landing pages as well. While the landing pages always offered a description, image, and the ability to browse all records in the collection, we’ve added a “Search within” function too! Some MWDL collections are hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of records so we wanted to offer the chance to zero in more.

Moving on to our About pages, we consolidated and updated more than ten separate pages to streamline content about MWDL, our network, and our work with DPLA.

Finally, we folded our previous WordPress site into our new blog and imported all posts from our Blogspot blog! Stroll down memory lane and see how far we’ve come!

And… if you’re feeling extra nostalgic for MWDL’s old sites, check out these screenshots from Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine!