{"id":6752,"date":"2013-02-04T11:25:02","date_gmt":"2013-02-04T16:25:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/?p=6752"},"modified":"2013-02-04T11:37:30","modified_gmt":"2013-02-04T16:37:30","slug":"meet-the-hubs-mountain-west-digital-library","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/2013\/02\/04\/meet-the-hubs-mountain-west-digital-library\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the Hubs!: Mountain West Digital Library"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another week, another digital hub! This week, I\u2019ve spent some time searching through the collections of the Mountain West Digital Library<\/a>. The MWDL serves as a portal to content from 60 partner organizations in Utah, Nevada, Idaho, and Hawaii. With partners ranging from academic libraries to historical societies to religious organizations, the MWDL provides a comprehensive look at the historical documents, photographs, maps, and even the sounds (!) of the American West.<\/p>\n

I decided I would browse through the MWDL by looking at its collections; there are some 370 collections made available via the MWDL portal, so even though I couldn\u2019t by any stretch of the imagination search through all of them, I did manage to find several really interesting and unusual collections without a problem.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
A print of the Puerta de San Andr\u00e9s by J. Laurent y Cia from the 19th century, courtesy of the University of Nevada, Reno<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Among the first of the collections to catch my eye was a collection of Basque posters hosted by the University of Nevada, Reno\u2019s Basque Library and Center for Basque Studies. The posters, many of them from Basque festivals in the US and in Basque Country, are beautiful. I\u2019m especially fond of a 1977 poster<\/a> displaying a crest that contains the shields of six of the seven regions of Basque Country. \u00a0The collection also contains a number of vintage photographs from Spain, including a phenomenal 1870 print<\/a> of the Puerta de San Andr\u00e9s in Segovia.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
A 1977 poster bearing the Basque coats of arms, courtesy of the University of Nevada, Reno<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Another collection, \u201cCookery and Culture<\/a>,\u201d contains digitized historical cookbooks made between the 1700s and the turn of the 20th<\/sup> century. \u201cCookery and Culture\u201d is part of Utah State University\u2019s digital collections. I began reading a volume titled Cookery, It\u2019s Art and Practice<\/a>, <\/em>which was written in 1895. The volume begins very self-seriously:\u201ccookery has attained its present development by a long process of experimental empiricism, at which all mankind has laboured from the very early days of its existence.\u201d It goes on to contain a lengthy dictionary of contemporary culinary terms. With 57 texts dating from the era, the collection provides really great insight into the history of cooking in the US.<\/p>\n

One of the MWDL\u2019s other unusual collections is the Western Soundscape Archive<\/a>, a collection of nearly 3,000 sound clips of nature sounds and the calls of animals indigenous to the western United States. From the mating calls of Pacific chorus frogs to the foot thumps of the white-throated woodrat<\/a>, the archive contains a fairly comprehensive library of the sounds of the Mountain West region. \u00a0As such, it presents an unusual, immersive experience of the Western soundscape. Altogether, the MWDL\u2019s portal offers access to a truly diverse range of documents, images, and sounds detailing the history of the western US and beyond.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Cover Image\u00a0<\/em>1864 Johnson’s California, with Utah, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona Map<\/a>. Courtesy of Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, 295 S 1500 E, Salt Lake City, UT 84112.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The fourth post in a series introducing the DPLA’s service hubs looks at the Mountain West Digital Library, and explores some of the hidden treasures found in its collections, from the sounds of the West to historic cookbooks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5325,"featured_media":6767,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[923,2236],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-featured"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/files\/2013\/02\/MWDL.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5325"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6752"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6780,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6752\/revisions\/6780"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dplaalpha\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}