Regional Aggregation and Discovery of Digital Collections: The Mountain West Digital Library

The Mountain West Digital Library (MWDL) is a digital collaborative of over 180 partners from five states in the U.S. West, sharing free access to over 775 digital collections with over 950,000 resources. Partners of the MWDL work together on providing regional discovery via an online portal at mwdl.org and facilitating, on behalf of the region, the on-ramp to national discovery via the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) portal at dp .la. MWDL was organized around these common goals: • Establish a distributed digitization and hosting infrastructure to support memory institutions in sharing their digital collections • Increase public access to digital collections materials through aggregation and discovery via open search portals • Promote interoperability of metadata via common standards and enhancements • Share expertise and training This chapter describes how these goals have been met for MWDL partners, through a coordinated network of distributed repositories supporting collections and a central harvesting system for searching. Key to the success of regional discovery has been the establishment of common standards and practices, along with the development of useful data enhancement practices, also described below. How MWDL has adapted over its years of growth and adoption of changing technologies, and particularly how it has served the emergence of the new national digital library, are also discussed. Finally, future directions for collaborative discovery are suggested, with notes about the challenges ahead.