Not a chain of convenience stores - this Foursquare is a website/application that lets you use your cellphone etc to "check in" when you reach locations like cafes, movie theatres, libraries, etc. At its worst this floods your friends with endless notifications: "Now I'm at the dairy! Now I'm at home! Now I'm at the busstop! Now I'm at work! Now...!" But at best you walk into your favourite cafe and:
- read tips from other customers about what to order or avoid;
- win a prize from the cafe itself;
- discover that your friend is in the area and arrange for them to meet you for a quick cuppa.
- Foursquare, Libraries, and Librarians;
- Foursquare and Libraries - Anything There?;
- and its followup Foursquare and Libraries - Definitely Something There!
EBSCO buys up exclusive electronic access to a number of popular periodicals which will be removed from other databases that used to provide them. Reactions:During negotiations between Amazon and "big 6" publisher Macmillan over pricing of ebooks, Amazon removed all Macmillan titles (electronic and print) from its database. Reactions:
- the breaking news;
- Macmillan's CEO responds promptly;
- among many many others, authors Charles Stross, John Scalzi, Tobias Buckell, Cory Doctorow weigh in;
- and finally Amazon responds in an obscure location two days after it all happened (this is months in internet-time).
Bookcovers in LibGuides
Springshare have announced a partnership with Syndetics so we can now use Syndetics bookcover images in our LibGuides. This is just like using the images from Amazon before - when adding a featured book just insert ISBN, click icon, and voila a cover image - but click the "S" (Syndetics) icon instead of the Amazon icon. An added advantage is that Syndetics works with ISBN-13 as well as ISBN-10 (Amazon is limited to ISBN-10).
European theses
The DART-Europe E-theses Portal gathers and provides "access to 123327 full-text research theses from 210 universities sourced from 16 European countries".
