Mountain West Digital Library

This week I looked at the Mountain West Digital Library, a conglomeration of digital resources from several institutions across Utah, Nevada, and Idaho.

Collection Principles: The library includes content from the thirty-three collection partners, which include universities, museums, public libraries, colleges, archives, and historical societies, all of which supply their digital collections to make up this library. The eight hosting institutions run servers to support their own and partner institutions��� collections, as well as provide scanning services. The library is therefore defined by a geographic area rather than by the topic of its content.

All contributing institutions come from the Mountain West, while their content is any that is found in their digital collections, with some limitations. The goal of the library is to support the teaching of Utah, Nevada, and Idaho citizens in pursuit of life-long learning. Submitted content to the library should either document the history of the region, promote an informed citizenry, be for preservation purposes, feature rare resources, highlight significant resources of the region, or support teaching not already available digitally.

Metadata: Each institution���s collections appear in ContentDM format, making the object metadata readily accessible. Overall, the objects in the library have good, consistent metadata in a modified Dublin Core format. However, since the collections are coming from several different institutions, the number of metadata fields for the objects varies by the contributing institution. However, there are documented standards for the library as a whole to ensure that the required metadata fields are all filled out in the same way for the different material types.

Object Characteristics: Objects in the digital library are in text, image, video, or audio format. The images are presented in jpeg format, while the videos can be streamed using Real Media, Windows Media Player, or QuickTime. The audio files are largely available as mp3���s, with some transcriptions available as PDFs. Text objects also appear in PDF format.

Like the metadata, the object characteristics and whether information about their specifications is provided depends upon the institution. For those institutions that do provide technical metadata, objects were frequently scanned on an Epson Expression 1630XL flatbed scanner or Epson GT-3000 and saved as TIFFs. Text objects are scanned at 400 ppi at 1 bit bitonal black and white. Dark, colored, or poor resolution text is scanned at 400 ppi with an 8 bit grayscale. Photograph prints are scanned at 600 ppi at 24 bit color, while negatives are scanned at 1600 ppi and 48 bit color.

Audience: Since the collections that make up this library come from so many different sources on a variety of topics, I think this resource could be used by a wide audience. There are pieces of art, personal histories, historic photographs, museum exhibits, and government documents, among other types of material, which answer a wide array of user needs. It is great for the casual browser, where you can browse by institution or collection, or just run a keyword search.