Friend of the podcast Peter Hirtle stands in for Amanda to give Tom, Mills, and Dan some much needed legal education as we take on SOPA, PIPA, the Research Works Act, and the Supreme Court’s decision in Golan v. Holder [PDF]. We also consider Apple’s attempts to shake up the textbook market and the sad fate of two very old University of Nevada at Reno students’ Facebook pages.

Links mentioned on the podcast:

Apple Introduces Tools to (Someday) Supplant Print Textbooks
Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement
How Wikipedia Turned Off the Lights
Publishers Applaud Research Works Act
Supreme Court Upholds Law That Pulled Foreign Works Back Under Copyright
Facebook Deletes University’s History Project for Violating Social Network’s Rules

Running time: 1:00:31
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In this episode of Digital Campus, Tom, Mills, and Amanda (sans Dan) touch briefly on the passing of Steve Jobs and discuss Apple’s announcement of iOS5, the release of the Kindle Fire and other new Kindle products, the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Project Directors meeting, and one university’s brief ban on social media sites. We also agree that “Nickerson” probably isn’t the best name for a razor company.

Links:

• Jobs, Apple co-founder and visionary, is dead, New York Times
• Apple releases iOS5, CNET News
• Amazon unveils $199 Android Kindle Fire tablet, $99 e-ink Kindle Touch, Ars Technica
• The Promise of Digital Humanities, Inside Higher Ed
• Back in Blackout, Inside Higher Ed

Running time: 41:35
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A few days before we recorded the latest episode of Digital Campus, Apple visionary and guru of all things cool in digital technology Steve Jobs announced that he would step down as CEO in what we assume will be the end of his adept micromanaging of the business. Tom, Dan, Amanda, and Mills mused on what Jobs’ legacy will be and how the tech world may or may not be different without him. Will we feel like orphans now that the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Sphere can no longer descend upon us at times of severe tech ennui? And what about those other digital orphans — the “orphan books” we hear so much about? Amanda reviewed for us the latest on this subject coming out of the University of Michigan Library and some of us agreed that we will henceforth banish the term “orphan work” from our vocabulary. Why? Listen and learn. And from what we learned about student searching skills, someone should start teaching students more about online quests for information. That someone could be you.

Links to stories covered in the podcast:

Stanford Silicon Valley Archives
Orphan Books Online
Student Searching Skills

Running time: 37:56
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Lisa Spiro and Jeff McClurken join Amanda, Mills, and Tom for a high summer episode of Digital Campus. (Dan Cohen did not join us this time, choosing instead to remain incommunicado in an undisclosed location while he writes some book or something.) There is no avoiding the story of Aaron Swartz, the 24-year-old Harvard researcher arrested for hacking MIT’s JSTOR subscription, which raised for our panel, among other concerns, ongoing questions about open access and the viability for libraries of “big deal,” multiple-journal subscription packages. We also mourn (or celebrate) the demise of the big box bookseller Borders, share thoughts about the next generation of operating systems (including Mac OS 10.7 “Lion” and Windows 8), and hold our collective breath as we await major cuts to humanities funding from Congress.

UPDATE 8/17: There was a stretch of dead air in the recording we first posted that we’ve gotten rid of. The corrected recording is below; in a podcast manager such as iTunes you can delete the old recording and refresh your feed to get the new, corrected one. You might need to unsubscribe and resubscribe to the feed. Also, check out this terrific article on the Swartz affair by Maria Bustillos over at The Awl.

Running time: 56:58
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Steve Ramsay joins us on the podcast as we scratch our heads over some strange decisions by the big tech companies, namely Microsoft’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype and Google’s entry into the netbook (or “Chromebook”) market. We also mourn the death of the Flip camera, killed by its similarly unlikely owner, Cisco. To end the show we return to our bread and butter of digital libraries to catch up with the Digital Public Library of America, which announced a summertime “beta sprint.” Perhaps they heard our frequent pleas for “less talk, more grok” and “less yak, more hack”?

Additional links related to the podcast:

Flip Video Vlog: A Tale of Two Formats

Digital Public Library of America: Prelim Plans for “Beta Sprint” Released

Will Chromebooks for Education be a Good Deal for Schools?

Running time: 56:14
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Joined by new podcast irregular Audrey Watters, educational technology writer for ReadWriteWeb, the Digital Campus crew discusses a whole passel o’ news for this episode. Dan Cohen gives us an eyewitness report from the first meeting of the Digital Public Library of America initiative, identifying three (only three?) chief tensions: how “public” and how “American” such a library could be; how centralized such a library should be; and how such a library could help fulfill our national yen for free Dan Brown ebooks. Tom thinks the iPad 2 shows that Apple is a little behind the curve (cough, cough, Android), but Audrey thinks that consumers are going to prefer Apple to Android (cough, cough, apps), especially since you can get Dan Brown ebooks in the iBooks store. We do all agree that the iPad 2 is a lot more classroom-friendly than the first iPad, though. Mills gives us his take on Bill Gates’s influence on education, and promises Bill that for an educational technology grant of a mere $20 million, he won’t buy an iPad 2 after all. Finally, we claim that we don’t want UniLeaks, the WikiLeaks for higher education, to degenerate into a gossip site like Juicy Campus, but we might be lying just a little bit.

Links to stories and articles mentioned in the podcast:

Dan Cohen, What Scholars Want from the Digital Public Library of America
David Weinberger, Questions From and For the Digital Public Library of America
Amanda French, Imagine a National Digital Library: I Wonder If We Can
Josh Hadro, HarperCollins Puts 26 Loan Cap on Ebook Circulations
Marianne Takle, The Norwegian National Digital Library
Audrey Watters, Will the iPad 2 Make the Grade for Classroom Usage?
Kara Swisher, Kno Student Tablet Start Up in Talks to Sell Off Tablet Part of Business
David Rapp, Internet Archive Tests New Ebook Lending Waters: In-Library, and License-Free
Jeff Young, Professor’s Online Lecture Gets Lift from Bill Gates
Bill Gates, How Teacher Development Could Revolutionize Our Schools
Bill Gates on Big History
Marc Parry, A WikiLeaks Clone Takes On Higher Education

Running time: 54:26
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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 a very special timetraveling episode, the Digital Campus crew journey back to 2007 to hear from their old selves–specifically, what they said about e-books when Amazon’s Kindle was released–and whether their present selves agree with their ghosts from the past in light of the release of the Kindle 2 and the mobile version of Google Books. Also covered on the podcast are the demise of rumor site Juicy Campus and music site Ruckus, the impact of Creative Commons and downloads on YouTube, and the addition of history to Google Earth. Picks for the episode include a programming interface for New York Times articles, a blog on the futures of learning, a search engine for open journals, and a site for medieval manuscripts.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Kindle 2
Google Book Search Mobile
New York Times Article Search API
Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts
Futures of Learning blog
Google Earth 5’s Historical Imagery
JURN search engine

Running time: 49:18
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Tom and Dan kick off the new year by annoying Mills with tales of Twitter and tweets. In our newly extended news roundup, the panel looks at the use of Twitter at academic conferences; assesses the Palm Pre and the future of mobile apps for education, museums, and libraries; wonders about touch screens and the blind; thinks once again about the use of e-book readers on campus; discusses the end of Google Notebook and what it says about putting your research in services that might fail; debates the wisdom of putting academic articles on Wikipedia; and gives an update on Europeana, the EU digital library.

Other links for the episode:
Amanda French on the digital MLA experience
HearPlanet iPhone application
The American Association of History and Computing
ReframeIt and Web Annotation

Running time: 49:32
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The big news this week was the announcement that a settlement had been reached between Google and authors and publishers over Google’s controversial Book Search program, which has scanned over seven million volumes, including many books that are still copyrighted. The Digital Campus team takes a first pass at the agreement and tries to understand how it might affect higher ed. Other news from a busy week include the release of the first phone based on Google’s Android operating system, and Microsoft’s conversion to “cloud” computing. Picks for this podcast include a new report on teenagers and videogames, a new version of Linux for the masses, and a program to help you focus on the Mac.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Google Book Search Settlement Agreement
Open Library
Ubuntu
Think for the Mac
Android
Microsoft Azure
Pew report on teens and videogames

Running time: 49:29
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