October 6, 2011 – The J. Willard Marriott Library at The University of Utah Library has been awarded two National Leadership Grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

In the planning grant category, the Marriott Library and project partners Mountain West Digital Library, Northwest Digital Archives and Rocky Mountain Online Archives was awarded $49,943 for a one-year project called “Planning for a Western Archival Network.” With matching funds, the budget totals $62,951. The Marriott Library and its partners will explore ways to improve the usability of software and systems designed to search groups of encoded descriptions of archival collections. Once the planning is completed and the methods are implemented, the need for extensive Internet searching will diminish, and end-users will find easier and quicker access to archival materials.

The second grant was a $439,142 demonstration grant for the three-year project, “Getting Found: Search Engine Optimization for Digital Repositories.” With matching funds, the total project budget is $878,820. Working with the Online Computer Library Center, Inc., the Digital Library Federation, and the Mountain West Digital Library, the Marriott Library will test and evaluate a strategy for making library digital repositories significantly more visible in Internet search engines such as Google, Google Scholar, and Bing.