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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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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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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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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This time on Digital Campus the regulars tackle the notion of “digital natives,” the conventional wisdom that says children born during the Internet era (say, since the late 1980s) understand digital technology intuitively. Are today’s students naturally fluent in the language and customs of digital technology, or are they more like the rest of us, who have to work hard to make computers work for us? We take a look at both sides of the debate. In the news roundup we discuss Google’s latest digitization project (newspapers this time), the publishing lobby’s attempt to close NIH’s open access research portal, and two new foundations to support good things on the web.

Links mentioned on the podcast:

Google to Digitize Newspaper Archives, New York Times
Backlash Against Open Access, Ars Technica
Digital Promise
World Wide Web Foundation
The Generational Myth, Chronicle of Higher Education
Harvard Professor Sees Answers to Nagging Web-Youth Issues, Cnet
A Companion to Digital Literary Studies
What to Look for in Tech Staff, Tech Therapy
Many Eyes

Running time: 48:49
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In the feature story of this episode, Tom, Mills, and Dan finally get to vent about the increasing annoyances of legal restrictions and threats that face those trying to do digital work in academia, libraries, and museums. Copyright—both in its traditional form and in modern incarnations like the DMCA—has made it more difficult than ever to figure out how and when to post something online, and for those creating digital tools, the further threat of patent lawsuits awaits. In the news roundup we talk about another threat—that of online predators and a new Virginia law intended to thwart them—and note the launch of offline Google Docs, which now provides a more compelling alternative to Microsoft Office. Links for the week include a museum podcast that’s good for the classroom, a tech blog for students, and a declaration for open access to educational materials and technology.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Virginia Schools Start To Teach Internet Safety
DMCA
Fair Use
Open Access News
NIH’s Public Access Requirement
Restriction: No Text Mining of PubMed
Professor Sues Student Over Lecture Notes
Elsevier Lets MIT Use Copyrighted Materials
Patent Office Rejects Blackboard’s E-Learning Patent in Preliminary Ruling
Google Docs Launches Offline Support
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum @ iTunesU
Hack College blog
Cape Town Open Education Declaration

Running time: 47:24
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Can print on demand shake up academic publishing, book buying, and reading habits? Another terrific guest joins us on the podcast for a feature segment on the promise and perils of print on demand: Yakov Shafranovich, a software developer who specializes in print on demand services including PublicDomainReprints.org, covered in several prior Digital Campus episodes. We spend most of the news roundup debating the impact of the Harvard faculty vote in favor of open access scholarship, while also covering Blackboard’s victory in a flimsy patent case. Picks of the week include a good new podcast, a flashy historical website, and an easy way to add images to your blog posts.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Harvard Open Access Policy
PublicDomainReprints.org
New Academia Press
European Navigator
First Monday Podcast
PhotoDropper

Run time: 58:32
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Are open educational resources such as iTunes U and thought-provoking dot-coms such as BigThink.com a distraction from the mission of professors and universities, or the wave of the future? Tom, Mills, and Dan debate the merits of “open access” intellectual content in the feature story. We also follow up on Dan’s experience with buying a book from PublicDomainReprints.org, compare the MacBook Air with the small, cheap laptops discussed on the last episode of Digital Campus, and discuss the launch of Flickr Commons. Our picks of the week point to three great ways to use RSS feeds more effectively.

Links mentioned on podcast:
PublicDomainReprints.org
Flickr Commons
MacBook Air
iTunes U
BigThink.com
Berkeley’s YouTube Channel
Google Reader Sharing
ReadBurner
Yahoo Pipes
FeedJournal

Runtime: 51:15
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The second most frequently asked question at museums after “Where are the restrooms?” is “Where is the art?” In this episode we ask whether those artifacts belong on a museum’s website, and if so, how, as we debate the proper relationship between a museum’s virtual and physical manifestations. Our news roundup covers the opening up of Harvard’s scholarship, Berkeley’s YouTube channel, iTunesU, and two software projects that aim to improve the library catalog and the museum exhibit. We also highlight Errol Morris’s blog posts on truth in photography, a great museum blog, and a tool for converting one type of digital file to another.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Omeka
Scriblio
Harvard Crimson editorial on open access
Berkeley’s YouTube channel
National Museum of African American History and Culture
Errol Morris on two Crimean War photographs (part 1; part 2)
Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0 blog
YouConvertIt

Running time:51:35
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Web design guru Jeremy Boggs joins Dan, Tom, and Mills to discuss the past, present, and future of designing websites for academia, museums, and libraries. In the news roundup, we cover a number of situations where information and images have shown up at inopportune times and in inopportune places, including the case of the MySpace photo that got a student in hot water, a chart on a blog that caused a copyright furor, and the “liberation” of class-related documents that got some Harvard students in trouble.

Sites mentioned in the podcast:
Molly.com
SimpleBits
mezzoblue
meyerweb
Color Blindness Simulator

20 Usability Tips for Your Blog
Google Earth Overlays of Greensburg, Kansas
Directory of Open Access Journals

Running Time: 50:24

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