Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Mountain West Digital Library Anchors the National Public Library of America

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) went live last week with much fanfare.  It's great to see something get going like this and I hope that it continues to grow. What you might not expect is that the largest partner of the DPLA originated right here in Utah.  The Mountain States Digital Library (MDLA) currently has 693,469 objects in the DPLA, more than even NARA, the National Archives and Records Administration.

The MDLA, which presently hosts resources from Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and Hawaii is a project of the Utah Academic Library Consortium and is growing by the minute.  One of its more prominent collections is supported by the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts digitization project, which is a major effort to digitize historic artifacts and records owned by the department.

It's cool to see the DPLA taking an open approach to development.  The new site already hosts a couple of apps and offers resources for developers.  I'm excited to see what happens in the future as this online public library continues to grow and develop.

See also: "Meet the Hubs: Mountain West Digital Library" and "Bringing the Power of Digital History to the Mountain West"
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1 comment:

Sandra McIntyre said...

Thanks, Dave, for noticing that, at least for the moment, the number of records shared from the 60+ partners of the Mountain West Digital Library in the new DPLA is larger even than the number from the National Archives or the Smithsonian. We imagine that it won't be long now before that changes! We have enjoyed the adventure with DPLA so far and will continue to expand our services to memory institutions in the Mountain West with the help of temporary DPLA funding over the next year.

Sandra McIntyre
Program Director, Mountain West Digital Library
sandra.mcintyre@utah.edu

5:18 PM

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