John Wilkin will speak on preserving our written cultural heritage
The Orcas Island Library will offer a lecture and discussion, “Digital libraries: facing the challenge of preserving our written cultural record,” in its meeting room from 5 to 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 4.
John Wilkin, Associate University Librarian for Publishing and Technology at the University of Michigan, and Executive Director of HathiTrust, will talk about collaborative efforts among libraries to gather, share, and preserve digitized content via the Google Books project, as well as from a variety of other sources.
How can we make research libraries more usable and useful? How do we win the race against time to preserve brittle archival materials? Who decides what from our burgeoning written output should be kept, and in what format? In addressing these fascinating and frustrating questions, Wilkin will draw on his long experience with research and publishing, and with helping to organize cooperative efforts among our major academic libraries.
The University of Michigan Library is a leader in its longstanding support for electronic publishing in all fields, and for helping to make research materials increasingly accessible online. The mission of HathiTrust, a nonprofit partnership, is to contribute to the common good by collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge.
With this and upcoming events, Orcas Island Library continues to celebrate its 20th year in the current building. The program is free and open to the public. Please contact Library Director Phil Heikkinen with any questions, at 376-4985 or pheikkinen@orcaslibrary.org.
