We report on a new CLIR / NITLE project to develop a technical infrastructure for publishing new-model digital scholarship, what’s coming in the next version of Mac OS X and other operating systems and what their cloud centrism might mean for universities and their privacy concerns, and canvas the current (and historic) situation with regard to open access. All best wishes for speedy recovery of your voice, Mills.

Editor’s Note 2/27/2012: Soon after we recorded the podcast on 2/24/2012, Elsevier withdrew its support for the Research Works Act, and news subsequently spread that indeed the entire Act would not go forward. See http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/intro.cws_home/newmessagerwa and https://plus.google.com/u/0/107980702132412632948/posts/a4DzVk9n7fG.

Links to stories mentioned on the podcast:

• Plans for new publishing platform “Anvil”: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/02/13/anvil-academic-aims-provide-platform-digital-scholarship
• Looking ahead to Mac OS X Mountain Lion: http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-57378751-248/apple-mac-os-x-mountain-lion-takes-more-bites-out-of-ios/
• Why Mozilla is entering the smartphone war: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/why-mozilla-is-entering-the-smartphone-war/
• Mozilla’s Persona Project: http://www.webmonkey.com/2012/02/mozillas-persona-project-wants-to-help-manage-your-online-identity/
• Apple address book data accessed by many apps: http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/15/applebook/
• Google Chromebooks in schools: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-57365703-264/27000-google-chromebooks-headed-to-u.s-schools/
• Australia mandates open access to biomedical research within 12 months: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/australia-to-open-publicly-financed-biomedical-research/35505?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
• Elsevier boycott continues: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/why-are-we-boycotting-elsevier
• Letter from @FakeElsevier: http://fakeelsevier.wordpress.com/2012/02/19/dear-elsevier-employees-with-love-from-fakeelsevier/

Running time: 59:10
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Sometimes we wonder to ourselves (and to those of you listening) whether some of the biggest “stories” in the world of digital media really are stories. Maybe it’s just us, but is it really news that Google is combining all of its user data into one big file? Or did Apple really revolutionize the textbook market? Dan, Amanda, and Mills asked these and other really, really big questions during the most recent podcast. Among those other questions were whether the growing boycott of Elsevier publications by scholars was really going to make a difference and why it should (or shouldn’t)? We also speculated on what it would be like to take an online course with 64,999 of your closest friends at a university called U-Da-City? To find out where we ended up on each of these very pressing issues of the day, give a listen and tell us what you think in that comment field below.

Links:

European Union Presses Google to E.U. to Delay Privacy Policy Changes
On (Not) Learning to Code
Elsevier Boycott Gathers Pace

Running Time: 46:40

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Is it just us, or does it seem kind of strange to see people walking around campus, the mall, or the local park talking to their phones as if those phones were actually sentient? Even if it is a little strange, Dan, Tom, Amanda, and Mills spent some time speculating about what such “talk to me” apps might mean for museums, historic sites, and other places digital humanists care about. We also had generally nice things to say about the developer build of Windows 8 and about the recent meeting about the Digital Public Library of America. Our discussion of free content then led to a conversation about how much money is being made publishing academic journals by just a few publishing houses and why open access scholarship is so necessary to the circulation of knowledge. Our outrage about journal publishing profits burned itself out when we turned to a brief look at the newly launched (and free) Digital Humanities Now, a CHNM project. We finished with perhaps the world’s shortest conversation about Google+. Why? Give a listen and find out.

Links mentioned in the podcast:

In Public It’s Rude, In Private It’s Creepy
Why Indoor Navigation is so Hard
Building Windows 8
Download Windows 8 Developer Preview
DPLA: First Things First
Copyright Office on Mass Digitization
Economics of Open Access Publishing

Running time: 58:45
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The regulars are joined this week by the great Tom Merritt of Tech News Today and TWiT fame. We discuss in depth the surprising lawsuit by the Authors Guild against five universities and HathiTrust, related to the ongoing Google Book Search legal saga. We also look at whether a “Netflix for books” is possible or desirable. And Dan gets a little too badge-happy. You’ll get a badge for listening to this week’s freewheeling podcast.

Be sure to check out Tom Merritt’s new book, United Moon Colonies, available in multiple formats for your reading (and listening) pleasure.

CORRECTION FROM AMANDA: I mistakenly said on the podcast that public domain works in Hathi Trust are not publicly available: in fact, public domain works in Hathi Trust can be *read* by the public, although not *downloaded.* Moreover, works in Hathi Trust published between 1870 and 1923 that are in the public domain in the U.S. are not available to be read outside the U.S. See Hathi Trust’s copyright FAQ for more precise information. — Amanda

Other links mentioned on the podcast:
Digital Media and Learning Competition 4
Think You’re An Auditory Or Visual Learner? Scientists Say It’s Unlikely
Sigil, A WYSIWYG ebook editor

Running time: 1:02:50
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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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On Friday, June 3, we live-streamed Digital Campus from the first day of THATCamp CHNM, The Humanities and Technology Camp at the Center for History and New Media. About half the live audience of seventy-five or so people said they had heard the podcast before — it was great to see the listeners in person, not to mention one another.

We discussed at some length the trial of the copyright lawsuit brought against Georgia State University by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Sage Publications, agreeing that if the publishers were to win their suit, teaching faculty would certainly have to become more aware than ever before about the costs of the readings they assign. Also on the table (more briefly) were Google’s cessation of its mass digitization of newspapers, the major search engines’ support for structured data with http://schema.org, the Library of Congress’s plans to transition away from MARC, YouTube’s announcement of Creative Commons licensing, and Amanda’s alternative solution to the Open Researcher and Contributor ID.

Special thanks to Chris Preparato, who managed the audio recording and livestreaming. And, with proof that we’re at least as good-looking as you always imagined, here’s video of the episode 70 of Digital Campus, kindly provided in high definition by George H. Brett (whom you can also hear making a comment about parallels between the GSU case and the early days of Electronic Theses and Dissertations). Thanks so much, George, for capturing this.

Stories or projects mentioned on the podcast:

What’s at Stake in the Georgia State Copyright Case

Google Ditches Newspaper Archive Plan

Google, Bing & Yahoo’s New Schema.org Creates New Standards for Web Content Markup

Open Researcher and Contributor ID

Library of Congress May Begin Transitioning Away from MARC [Machine-Readable Cataloging]

Google Rolls Out YouTube Creative Commons Licenses

Running time: 50:25
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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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In this edition of the podcast Tom, Amanda, Dan, and Mills considered whether recent news stories about spammers gaming the Google search engine algorithm herald the end of big search as we know it. Is it really the case that Google engineers are being out-coded by their counterparts at “content farms” and other spam generating locations? And if they are, what does that mean for educators, students, and cultural institutions like museums, libraries, and archives? We also looked at Q&A site Quora (we weren’t bowled over) and Google Art Project (everyone but Tom was bowled over).

Running time: 37:09
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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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