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

Download the .mp3

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
Download the .mp3

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
Download the .mp3

Bryan Alexander of NITLE joins Tom, Mills, and Dan for a spirited discussion about what this week’s news about three services used by many educators–Twitter, Facebook, and Ning–tells us about how faculty and students should approach online services. We dig into the meaning of the Twitter archive going to the Library of Congress, Facebook announcing how it will spread to the rest of the web, and Ning closing its doors to non-profits. Many questions are raised (and a few answered) about the significance of social media becoming a dominant part of our online existence.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Library of Congress Acquires Entire Twitter Archive
Facebook Launches New Privacy Section That May Make Your Head Hurt
National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program
Pew on Social Media and Young Adults
Dan on sustainability in last section of “The Idols of Scholarly Publishing”

Running time: 52:50
Download the .mp3

Mills, Tom, and Dan welcome Lisa Spiro back to the podcast to talk about the much ballyhooed launch of Apple’s iPad, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision against “net neutrality,” and—to the sounds of spring’s first robin song twittering through Mills’ open window—the role of the Twitter backchannel at the University of Virginia’s recent Shape of Things to Come conference. Other stories include the National Endowment for the Humanities announcement of 18 Digital Humanities Start-up Grants and Yale’s decision to delay its switch to Gmail.

Links mentioned on the podcast:

David Pogue’s New York Times review of the iPad
In Our Time, “The City”
New NEH Digital Start Up Grants at edwired.org
JISC crowdsourcing projects
Integrating Digital Papyrology Project
Civil War Washington

Running time: 1:06:50
Download the .mp3