John Wilkin - Biography
Currently the Associate University Librarian for Library Information Technology at the University of Michigan, John Wilkin is also the Executive Director of Hathi Trust, a large-scale digital resource collaborative founded by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation. After earning graduate degrees in English from the University of Virginia and Library Science from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Wilkin participated in a residential librarian program through the University of Michigan. This post brought him to the state and led to a position in charge of collection development for the English and American language and literature collection. While there, he implemented a campus-wide service for the analysis of electronic text and encoding in SGML.
In 1996, Wilkin obtained the position of Head of the Digital Library Production Service (DLPS) at the University of Michigan and held it until his current position at the same institution. While DLPS is currently affiliated with the University of Michigan Library and is supported by the library’s collections and base funding, it was initially a federal initiative. The three main functions of DLPS are to digitize library collections, host online collections, and provide leadership in library development.
Over the course of his career in digital services, Wilkin has brought new ideas to a burgeoning field. His work has built digital repositories and amassed a body of knowledge about the process of moving from analog to digital from the perspective of collaborative repositories.
Links:
Library Information Technology at the University of Michigan
Hathi Trust
July 2012
