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What would Google eBooks do? Nothing that involves human beings, says Dan: don’t look for “staff picks” from this long-awaited “cyberinfrastructure for distributed e-book sales” (which used to be called Google Editions). Your local independent bookseller will be more than happy to give you recommendations, but Dan and Tom are still worried that Google eBooks might hurt indie booksellers and university presses — though perhaps no more than Amazon already has. Mills, meanwhile, as befits a true “podcast intellectual,” can and does give many good reasons why keeping government documents secret for twenty-five years hurts historians and public policy makers; maybe if the U.S. government declassified things earlier, there wouldn’t have been such a frenzy over the illegally downloaded diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks. In any case, the cables are pretty mundane — if you consider acute analysis of diplomatic affairs mundane — and chances are that there’ll be even less salacious gossip in government correspondence from now on. Thanks a lot, Wikileaks. Finally, Tom wonders why the heck we need Chrome OS when we have Android; Google’s announcement that they’re releasing a Google Chrome notebook seems to have missed out on the fact that we’ve had a tablet revolution. Still, maybe students will like it. Students in first grade, that is.

Oh, yes, and Amanda hosts the podcast for the first time, in which multitasking capacity she expresses few opinions about anything. That loud typing is hers. Sorry about that.

Links to stories covered in the podcast:

Google Enters the E-Book Market at Last
Amazon enhances Kindle for the Web
Why Wikileaks is Bad for Scholars
Google shows Chrome notebook, Web Store

Running time: 51:11
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In this episode of Digital Campus, Dan, Amanda, and Mills (Tom was unavailable), were joined by Jennifer Howard from The Chronicle of Higher Education to discuss the latest trends in digital media, higher education, and in particular, libraries. We began by reprising a story from so long ago we could hardly remember it–college professors assigning their students to write or edit Wikipedia entries. Then we moved on to much more important topics, like Robert Darnton’s recent proposal to create a “national digital library.” We also discussed a rising trend among librarians–enthusiasm for “patron driven acquisition,” also know as PDA. Please don’t confuse this PDA with prior uses of that acronym! Amanda then chimed in with her take on Amazon’s plan to offer limited lendability for e-books. Regular listeners won’t be surprised by her take on this proposal. And we wrapped with Dan introducing us all to Omeka.net, CHNM’s newest way of making it easy for web users to create and manage archival and museum collections online.

Other links mentioned in the podcast:
Wikipedia’s Public Policy Initiative
National Digital Library proposal in The Chronicle
National Digital Library proposal in Libraryjournal.com
Patron driven acquisition in The Chronicle
Amazon.com’s ebook lending program

Running time: 52:13
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Digital Campus expands its roster to four with the addition of Amanda French as our newest co-host. It’s a busy week to start the new era, and we jump right in with news that Amazon is trying to revive the venerable pamphlet for the digital age. We turn next to three stories out of EDUCAUSE, including the Gates Foundation’s big splash, Second Life’s big flop, and Sherpa’s big promise. We applaud UVa and NARA’s announcement of open access to the Founding Father’s papers, and setting aside our iEverything for a change, we discuss some interesting new offerings from Microsoft, including Windows Phone 7 and Bing’s new Facebook-powered social search. We wrap things up with a some ideas to help you deal with the distractions of the online world.

Running time: 58:10
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For our fourth annual back-to-school edition of Digital Campus Tom, Dan, and Mills invited podcast irregulars Amanda French and Bryan Alexander to join in on a discussion of what we can expect in the year ahead. Mills wondered whether news from Facebook central that the ubiquitous social networking platform was losing its grip on college students meant it might be replaced by something new, but was shot down by others on the podcast. But we did speculate on what potential competitors like Diaspora might mean for the future of social networking among students. We also wondered whether this was the year that e-books begin to really replace textbooks on campus. The sudden demise of the digital version of Rice University Press also left us wondering whether digital imprints might ever replace the bricks and mortar/paper and glue university press. To find out what we concluded about all these possible digital replacements, you’ll just have to sit back and listen.

Links mentioned in the podcast:

How not to run a university press
Clay Shirky on the future of print
Mobile textbooks

Running time: 54:04
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In our first-ever live broadcast, Digital Campus hosts the big reveal of what came out of One Week | One Tool, a National Endowment for the Humanities-sponsored institute at the Center for History and New Media that brought together a diverse group of developers and scholars to produce a useful software application for the humanities (and beyond) in just one week. Joining the regulars on the podcast are four members of the One Week team, Boone Gorges, Kathie Gossett, Effie Kapsalis, and Steve Ramsay. The tool revealed, Anthologize, is a WordPress-based platform for book publishing. Regular Mills Kelly finds Anthologize as beautiful as his Hawaiian vacation.

Running time: 36:48
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What will be the impact of the loss of non-Anglophone books in the revised Google Books settlement? How about the loss of News Corporation content in Google’s search? Or the loss of physical books from the library? And what exactly does the loss of tens of thousands of editors mean to Wikipedia? Mills, Amanda, and Dan discuss these changes to our information environment in a special Thanksgiving edition of the podcast.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Revised Google Books Settlement
News Corp. Weighs an Exclusive Alliance With Bing
Report: Wikipedia losing volunteers
Syracuse University Library Considers Relocating Books
Citizendium
Top 100 Books Cited by Wikipedia

Running Time: 49:38
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On this podcast we’re delighted to introduce another two “irregulars,” Jennifer Howard, a writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Josh Greenberg, the director of digital strategy and scholarship at the New York Public Library. Jennifer and Josh give us terrific insights into the challenges that digitization and open access are posing to libraries and publishers, and speak of new models that are emerging out of the chaos, including coalitions of publishers and the Internet Archive‘s BookServer.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Research Librarians Discuss How to Sell Scholars on Open Access, and More
Columbia and Cornell Libraries Announce ‘Radical’ Partnership
Open Access to Research Is Inevitable, Libraries Are Told

Running time: 44:25
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