The NYT story on Sid Verba has been noted in several places. This quote caught my eye.

James Hilton, the interim university librarian at the University of Michigan, for example, said that he asked his staff a year ago to estimate how long it would take to digitize the library's seven million volumes. The answer was more than a 1,000 years. [At Harvard, a Man, a Plan and a Scanner - New York Times]