Great timing for us, as we record the podcast on the very day the US Appeals Court rules that yes, scanning in-copyright books for the purpose of creating an online index of them is indeed a transformative and therefore fair use. Huzzah! The way is clear for all kinds of things now. We also talk about a new digital humanities / libraries tool called BigDIVA that launched today, discussing mainly its plan to become a subscription-based paid service. That leads into a brief digression on the recent patent win by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation against Apple, which could potentially raise almost half a billion dollars for the University of Wisconsin system (just enough to make up for proposed budget cuts). We refrain from comment. Finally, Stephen Robertson reports on RRCHNM’s plan to build a new tool called Tropy, which would help researchers organize the pictures they take in archives.

Related Links

• “Google Books Scanning Legal,” Infodocket, http://www.infodocket.com/2015/10/16/ruling-just-in-google-book-scanning-project-legal-says-u-s-appeals-court/
• “Google Books Litigation Family Tree,” Library Copyright Alliance, http://www.librarycopyrightalliance.org/storage/documents/google-books-litigation-tree-16oct2015.pdf
• “Online Tool [BigDIVA] Aims to Help Researchers Sift Through 15 Centuries of Data,” NCSU press release, https://news.ncsu.edu/2015/10/big-diva-2015/
• “Apple’s Newest Courtroom Foe is a Patent-Savvy University,” Reuters, http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/16/us-apple-patent-wisconsin-idUSKCN0SA09G20151016
• “RRCHNM to Build Software [Tropy] to Help Researchers Organize Digital Photographs,” RRCHNM blog, http://chnm.gmu.edu/news/rrchnm-to-build-software-to-help-researchers-organize-digital-photographs/
• Stephen Robertson on Tropy, http://drstephenrobertson.com/news/tropy-a-tool-to-organize-describe-share-digital-images-taken-in-research/
• Sean Takats on Tropy, http://quintessenceofham.org/2015/10/02/hello-tropy-soon/

Running time: 44:54

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In the absence of Amanda French, Dan, Tom, Mills and Stephen were assisted by only two Amandas.  Tom and Stephen kicked off this podcast with A 2007-2015 discussion of new rules for the electronic management of government records and the implications of these new rules for transparency and historical access.  We then heard Dan’s thoughts on the Open Syllabus Project, which resulted in a discussion about how educators share or borrow from each others syllabi.  One of the questions raised was whether or not syllabus writers can claim copyright over their content, which segued nicely into A 2007-2015 discussion of Blackboard’s new open source policies.  Our group noted open sourced does not necessarily mean open access.  Finally, the group celebrated the first birthday of the Digital Public Library of America and congratulated Dan on its success.

Big Changes in Store for the Future Management of Government Records

• http://blog.historians.org/2014/04/big-changes-store-future-management-government-records/#sthash.iaTcUFTk.dpuf

Blackboard’s acquisition of open source software

• http://www.blackboard.com/About-Bb/News-Center/Press-Releases/Strategy-Update/Open-Letter.aspx
• http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/03/27/blackboard-buys-moodlerooms-creates-open-source-division#ixzz1qccBFsqC
• http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/digital-tweed/long-and-open-view-blackboard#sthash.ioEFvof6.dpbs

Open Syllabus Project

• http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/new-syllabus-archive-opens-the-curricular-black-box/51285
• http://opensyllabusproject.org/

Udacity charges for certificates

• http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/udacity-will-no-longer-offer-free-certificates/51757

DPLA’s 1st Birthday 

• http://dp.la/info/2014/04/17/dpla-1st-birthday-announcement/

Running time: 41:38
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For our hundredth anniversary episode, the digital history fellows divided up the 2007 episodes of Digital Campus and picked their favorite bits — listen to the result if you dare, and be transported back to the days when the iPhone was brand new, when Second Life was the Next Big Thing, and when you had to have an email address with a .edu TLD in order to use Facebook. Good times.

Many thanks to digital history fellows Ben Hurwitz, Jannelle Legg, Anne McDivitt, Amanda Morgan, Amanda Regan, and Spencer Roberts for choosing the clips, and many many thanks to audiovisual guru Chris Preperato for stitching them together.

Running time: 58:13
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In another single-topic Digital Campus, we react to the news that Dan is headed to the Digital Public Library of America as its Executive Director (no tears, no tears) by forcing him to tell us all about it. Special guests on the podcast include Berkman Center and DPLA Technical Workstream member David Weinberger, author of Too Big to Know and Everything is Miscellaneous as well as Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows and The Big Switch. Issues raised include Internet centralization, the future of public libraries, and Mr. Potato Head.

Links
Nicholas Carr, “The Library of Utopia,” MIT Technology Review, April 25, 2012. Available at http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/427628/the-library-of-utopia/

Running time: 49:45
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We’re joined this week in our last episode before our traditional summer hiatus by Bethany Nowviskie, Director of Digital Research and Scholarship at University of Virginia Libraries and president of the Association for Computers in the Humanities. We mainly discuss what’s going on at UVA, agreeing that it’s a good thing we’re having nationwide discussions now about what universities are doing, have done, and should be doing in the digital age with regard to scholarship and learning, and wondering whether the farmer and the cowman should be friends academics and businesspeople can find a common language. Back by popular demand is our old “pick of the week” segment, featuring UVA’s own ongoing archive of events taking place there.

Links mentioned on the podcast:

• Sullivan Resigns from UVa: Complete Coverage – The Chronicle of Higher Education
• reality bytes – Bethany Nowviskie
• Syllabus Journal
• ReadLists.com
• Encyclopedia of Connecticut History
• Archive of Materials Relating to the Resignation of President Teresa Sullivan

Running time: 54:36
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If there’s one theme in this episode of the podcast, it’s content being hidden from the open web. The new social network Google+ lets you create “circles” that will allow you to post certain content to certain people and hide it from others, but just as with Facebook, it’s not at all certain that future historians will be able to see any of it, or at least not in context. Computer scientists at Old Dominion University are working to estimate how much of the open web is backed up, and we’re happy to learn that at least thirty percent of it might be available for future study. Blackboard, the original turnkey for course content, is no longer a publicly traded company, and according to the well-read Mills Kelly, that’s because Blackboard may be losing market share to free and open source software. Finally, Tom and Dan tell us a little about PressForward, the Center for History and New Media’s new publishing initiative, which is made possible precisely because so much good work is not in fact locked down, but is freely available on the web.

UPDATE: Google+ does indeed have URLs for individual posts — thanks, Stephen, for pointing that out in the comments. Also, we’d like to give proper credit to Tim Carmody for his remark on Twitter that Google+ “is the first general-purpose social network actually designed for post-collegiate grown-ups.”

Links to stories covered in the podcast:

Audrey Watters, Google Plus: Is This the Social Tool Schools Have Been Waiting For?
Jeff Young, Professors Consider Classroom Uses for Google Plus
Josh Lowensohn, Google+ Access Coming to Google Apps, Eventually
Jie Jenny Zou, Old Dominion U. Researchers Ask How Much of the Web is Archived
Audrey Watters, How the Library of Congress is Building the Twitter Archive
Steve Kolowich, Blackboard Gets Bought
Dan Cohen, Introducing PressForward

Running time: 53:50
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We begin the news roundup this week with a bit of embarrassing news from Dan, then dig into several stories about big media companies entering the online learning market and Google Books becoming more useful for scholarship. In our feature segment, Tom and Mills explain how they try to stay productive in a world of constant digital distractions like email and blog feeds. Helpful links this week include a terrific site for teaching through famous trials, a way to customize Google, and a dead simple online to-do list. And we remember 9/11 through our own site, the September 11 Digital Archive.

Running time: 48:34
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How can you learn technical skills such as web design, programming, and related methods and technologies for work in the digital humanities? We tackle that difficult question on this week’s show, while also covering the top IT issues that universities face (according to CIOs), transcribing books the new fashioned way, and analog and digital news about Abraham Lincoln.

Links mentioned on the podcast:

Your Archives
The Museum of Underwater Archaeology
Google PageRank: What do we really know about it
Is Computer Science an Outdated Term? from Wired Campus
reCAPTCHA
Lincoln to Halleck from Footnote.com
What Al Wishes Abe Said
Top Ten IT Issues from Educause Review

Running time: 55:09

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We take a break from our normal format to spend the entirety of this episode thinking about the role of technology—its great power to forge social bonds and enable a new kind of memorialization, as well as its unfortunate ability to underscore the separation of those who remain outside social circles—in the terrible tragedy at Virginia Tech. We discuss the April 16 Archive website and Omeka, the software that runs it, as well as issues related to social networking sites, online gaming, and text messaging.

Running time: 29:28.

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