Grounding Tomorrow's Digital Library in Traditional Values - Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Ed

"I've always felt like a bit of an outlier in the digital library sphere," says John P. Wilkin, associate university librarian for library information technology at the University of Michigan. That's not what one expects to hear from a leader in the drive to build, connect, and preserve enormous collections of digitized material—a super-library for the 21st century. Mr. Wilkin is executive director of HathiTrust, an online digital repository with more than 10 million volumes. Created in 2008 with the help of Google's ambitious book-scanning project, the effort is housed at Michigan but draws on the collections and resources of more than 60 partner institutions. "From the beginning, it was about the collective interest of libraries," he says. "Not about Michigan's collections, but about the ways those collections are meaningful to other libraries."