Cookery & Culture, Las Vegas Before Gaming, Orem City, and Texas Toads

The library has a great resource for finding unusual items. We are part of the Mountain West Digital Library or MWDL. Dozens of organizations from small town libraries to musuems and large reserach institutions have teamed up to provide access to over 350,000 items, and they are fun items. There are collections of Basque posters, historic images from towns as diverse are Orem, Utah, and Las Vegas, Nevada, Mormon History Association items, cook books and gardening guide collections. There are collections on Howard Hughes and the Dialog Foundation. Images of skiers and bullfights.  Old cars, old buildings and an odd machine called a “snow tank.” There is even access to the Western Soundscape Archive where you can search for animal sounds by animal names in English or Latin. By the way a Texas Toad is also known as a Bufo speciosus.

(Image from the University of Nevada, Reno, Basque Posters)

The MWDL is a quick way to find images and stories to brighten up research projects. It also gives you a look at the collections held by other libraries in the west. Visit http://mwdl.org/index.php/home to begin your adventure.