Six Degrees of Acronyms: BYU in the DPLA

The new Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is a great resource for content about our country. What most people don’t know is the The Harold B. Lee Library (HBLL) was one of the early contributors to the system.

The Lee library is part of the Utah Academic Library Consortium (UALC), a group of university and college libraries who have teamed up to improve libraries. UALC created the Mountain West Digital Library (MWDL). The MWDL is run by a small team of dedicated, creative, and very effective people who have built a collection of images and other content from across the intermountain west. As the MWDL collections grew, along came the DPLA and the great folks at the MWDL, who jumped at the chance to participate. Suddenly, people throughout the country now have easy access to many of the Lee Library’s images through a nationally known system.

If you pay attention, you will find content from BYU appearing in papers and articles around the internet.

 (Coach Romney in ‘Counselor at Law,’ 1930s. Courtesy University Archives, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, via Mountain West Digital Library.)

So, BYU-HBLL-UALC-MWDL-DPLA-You

I bet you had no idea that it took so many acronyms to get great content on the Internet.