About
Our Mission
Mission statement
The USU Libraries support the teaching, learning, and research activities of Utah State University, a land grant university, and serves the public through learning, discovery, and engagement. The Digital Initiatives Department creates, organizes, preserves, and maintains open access to digital content that reflect USU's curriculum, research, unique resources, and achievements. Individually and in collaboration with other educational and cultural heritage institutions, this unit of the USU Libraries contributes to the pool of scholarly digital resources accessible to users worldwide.
What we do, in a nutshell
The USU Digital Initiatives Department digitizes materials owned by Utah State University Libraries and hosts them on the web as well as coordinates the Institutional Repository. We select materials based upon their uniqueness, research merit, potential for curriculum support, and appeal. Copyright restrictions, condition of the materials, and extent of data available to describe the materials also factor into material selection. Typically collections spotlight historical photographs, journals, old newspapers, letters, and other interesting items from our Special Collections and Archives. Digitizing these one-of-a-kind or rare materials, the Digital Library opens them up to a global audience, enhances access by subject and keyword searching, and reduces wear and tear on the originals.
Mountain West Digital Library
Utah State University's Digital Library also functions as a regional hub for the Mountain West Digital Library (mwdl.org), a collaborative project digitizing and/or hosting digital collections from regional cultural heritage institutions (libraries, museums, historical societies, etc.). We are one of MWDL’s regional hosting institutions, each running a CONTENTdm server supporting its own digital collections and supporting partner institutions by providing scanning and hosting services. Interested in partnering with us? Contact Becky Thoms at becky.thoms@usu.edu.