Grounding Tomorrow's Digital Library in Traditional Values - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"’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.’ To Mr. Wilkin, emphasizing the digital in ’digital library’ misses the point. The challenges of building an online library are the those of building any library in an era of superabundant information. What do you include? How do you make collections findable and usable? The answers get harder to pin down as the amount of material increases. ‘Our sense of the scope of the problems is imperfect,’ he says. ‘We don't know what a corpus is, what the comprehensive corpus is. We don't know what we're aiming at.’ Figuring that out absorbs a lot of Mr. Wilkin's attention at HathiTrust. Even in the face of a lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and other groups over access to digitized, copyrighted material, the repository has pressed ahead with efforts to get a handle on orphan works, whose rights-holders can't be identified or located. ‘The orphan-works problem, the in-copyright problem, all these things don't have numbers in the way they could have numbers,’ Mr. Wilkin says, noting the lack of estimates of how many works are affected. Part of his mission is to find those numbers... Since the mid-1990s, he has been involved in large-scale digitization at Michigan. For instance, he worked on the Making of America project, a joint venture with Cornell University, which created an online library of primary-source documents about American history from the antebellum period through Reconstruction. At that point, Mr. Wilkin realized that it wasn't enough to focus on text encoding and transcription. Technology had made possible ‘the reproduction of library materials on a large scale,’ he says. At the University of Michigan, that included shifting the library's preservation strategy ‘from reformatting and microfilming to entirely digital,’ he says. Other libraries were dubious. ‘We didn't convince anybody—anybody—that that was the right thing,’ he says. ‘There was so much skepticism.’ When Google's book-scanning project came along, digitization got big enough to capture people's attention. The dream of a large-scale digital repository didn't look so far-fetched after all. ‘Having a sense of scale changes everything,’ Mr. Wilkin says...”