University of Michigan associate university librarian John P. Wilkin has been named university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, effective Aug. 16, pending approval by the U. of I. Board of Trustees at its July 24 meeting in Chicago.
Illinois Provost Ilesanmi Adesida said Wilkin brings a broad skill set and valuable expertise to Illinois. “John began his academic career with a degree in literature, and he has been involved in the digital preservation of library collections since the mid-1990s,” Adesida said. “He has a proven track record of developing and implementing a clear vision for the library of the 21st century.”
John Price Wilkin
His involvement in mass digitization as a means of preserving library books goes back over a decade. Wilkin received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 1997 to digitize the “Middle English Dictionary” and make it accessible online. In 1999, he received an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant for the digitization of 7,500 19th-century monographs published in the U.S.
This work poised Wilkin to lead HathiTrust when it began about a decade later. In his role as executive director, he successfully guided HathiTrust’s defense when the Authors Guild sued HathiTrust and a handful of its partner libraries. (The guild has filed an appeal.)
At the national level, John Price Wilkin has served on committees for the Association of Research Libraries, as well as the Research Libraries Group and the Online Computer Library Center.
The internet has already had a major impact on how people find and access information, and now the rising popularity of e-books is helping 
CHICAGO – The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) announces the publication of the fourth installment in the association’s Active Guides series “
Rather than just refining and rebuilding products on models of functionality that have been in place since the early decades of library automation, many efforts are under way to break free from well-established historical approaches and create new products better aligned with the multifaceted realities of libraries in their collections and services and that embrace current technology architectures. Other threads of activity include the ongoing enhancement and redevelopment of existing products. The library tech scene has historically been one of evolution, but the current cycle includes some uncharacteristically revolutionary tracks.
Ebook borrowers, who are at OverDrive-powered public library websites in the U.S., also report that their digital content purchases have increased in the past 6 months. Sponsored by OverDrive with the American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP), the survey constitutes the largest study of library ebook usage to date, with more than 75,000 people responding.
More than eight in ten Americans between the ages of 16 and 29 read a book in the past year, and six in ten used their local public library. At the youngest end of the spectrum, high schoolers in their late teens (ages 16-17) and college-aged young adults (ages 18-24) are especially likely to have read a book or used the library in the past 12 months. And although their library usage patterns may often be influenced by the requirements of school assignments, their interest in the possibilities of mobile technology may also point the way toward opportunities of further engagement with libraries later in life. 
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