Bringing the power of digital history to the Mountain West - Knight Foundation

Use the link to access the interview introduced as follows: "The Mountain West Digital Library brings together repositories in Utah, Nevada, southern Idaho and Arizona, and is the only regional collaboration currently serving as a DPLA service hub. Mountain West's growth over the past 11 years has had a network effect. Program Director and DPLA service-hub Director Sandra McIntyre explains that it began with a core of academic libraries interested in learning about digitization, then spread into the communities around each of those institutions, bringing 120 cultural-heritage groups into the aggregation over the past decade, including public libraries, historical societies, county and state archives and even local museums. But there is much more Mountain West can do, and McIntyre hopes that its position as a DPLA service hub will 'help to accelerate the preservation and … access [to] valuable materials around the region.' The Mountain West Digital Library's position as a regional collaborative brings unique challenges, particularly with regards to funding, but it also allows users to see how topics play out across a larger area. In this interview, McIntyre talks about what DPLA's mission to forge links between libraries, archives and museums could mean for the cultural memory of our society; how it could help erase arbitrary lines between disciplines and democratize information in the United States; and the challenges involved in this ambitious undertaking."