A conversation with John Wilkin about the Michigan/Google digitization project

My guest for this week's podcast is John Wilkin. He's the director of the University of Michigan Library's technology department, and coordinator of the library's joint digitization project with Google. It's been two years since Google began partnering with the University of Michigan and with other libraries, including Harvard and the New York Public Library. In this conversation we talk about the UM's earlier (and still-ongoing) efforts to digitize its 7-million-volume library, about how the partnership with Google has radically accelerated that process, and about what this is all going to mean for libraries, for publishers, for Google, and for all us.

Web resources mentioned in the podcast include:

• JSTOR, a Mellon Foundation project chartered to "build a reliable and comprehensive digital archive of important scholarly journal literature"
• Making of America, "a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction"
• The Michigan Digitization Project, and in particular the contract between UM and Google
• Distributed Proofreaders, which "provides a web-based method of easing the proofreading work associated with the digitization of Public Domain books into Project Gutenberg e-books"

Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/12/01.html#a1570