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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Returning from a post-THATCamp hiatus, podcast regulars Dan, Mills, and Tom are joined by original irregulars Amanda French and Jeff McClurken to discuss the new iPhone, a nascent course management offering from Google, and the launch of Microsoft Office Web Apps. The panel applauds the University of California/California Digital Library in its showdown with Nature Publishing Group over subscription costs and weighs in on students buying and selling course spots on Craigslist. Hat tip to our good friend Bethany Nowviskie for this episode’s inspired title.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
ProfHacker
Letter from UC to faculty [.pdf]
Nature Publishing Group responds, via Ars Technica

Running time: 57:41
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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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While Dan is distracted and rendered unintelligent by his first experience with Google Wave, Mills, Tom, and newcomer Lisa Spiro manage to have a cogent discussion of whether Wave will have any (positive) impact on education, update the ongoing Google Books saga, examine Chrome within Internet Explorer, highlight the Kindle underperforming on campus, debate the FTC’s ruling on bloggers accepting gifts (including university presses giving free books to bloggers), and look at advance of net neutrality. Picks of the podcast include a wiki for seeing into the future, an assessment of collegiate internet use, tools for Twitter and RSS, and a time-waster of a blog.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Horizon Report wiki
Everyday life, online: U.S. college students’ use of the Internet
Twitter Feed
RSS Digest (WordPress Plugin)
Futility Closet blog

Running time: 43:45
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Dan and Mills welcome Tom back from paternity leave with a whirlwind roundup of the last month’s news. The regulars try to keep it real, exposing a scandal in scientific journal publishing, assessing the buzz surrounding the launch of a new computational search engine, questioning recent applications of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and delving once again into the Google Books settlement and some late breaking developments at the University of Michigan Library.

Other links mentioned on the podcast:

Cohen and Rosenzweig, Web of Lies? Historical Knowledge on the Internet
U.S. Copyright Office triennial DMCA exemption review
California’s open source digital textbook initiative
Microsoft Funds Opposition to Google Books settlement
Brewster Kahle on the Google Books settlement
The University of Michigan and Google Amended Digitization Agreement
Virtual Box
Zotero 2.0 drops

Running time: 51:52
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In a freewheeling news roundup we discuss the significance of a number of major changes in academic publishing, including MIT going open access, the University of Michigan Press going digital, Sony putting 500,000 books on their digital reading device, and the impact of budget cuts on presses and journals. We explore new models for academic publishing in the face of the economic downturn and the digital revolution. Picks of the week include a way for new Twitter users to find others in their discipline, documents from the National Security Archive, and a deadline for an unconference.

Other links mentioned on the podcast:
Stan Katz, “A Computer is Not a Typewriter”
UVA phasing out computer labs

Running time: 40:15
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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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