In case you missed it in your overstuffed RSS reader Jon Udell recently interviewed John Price-Wilkin who is coordinating the University of Michigan’s joint digitization project with Google.

The interview covers interesting bits of history about the University of Michigan Digital Library,
Making of America, JSTOR (didn’t realize there was a book), and of course the project with Google.

The shocker for me was that while the UMDL has been able to digitize 3000 books per year, Google is doing approximately that number a day. Wilkin wasn’t able to go into details about just how Google is doing this, but he does talk about details such as resolutions used, destructive vs non-destructive digitization, and how federations of libraries could work with this data.

Wilkin has been at the center of digital library efforts for as long as I’ve been working with libraries and technology, so it was really fun to hear this interview.