Tag Archives: foursquare

Links of interest 22/9/10

Assessing the (Enduring) Value of Libraries

MIT Libraries has created a Beta Graveyard for trial projects that aren’t being continued – nice to see what’s happened to old ideas.

Cyberpunk Librarian, part 1 – a librarian and a library robot; a problem and a cunning solution.

The launch of Foursquare buttons for websites – a button you can easily add to any website that lets users link your site and your physical location on their phone.

Hacking Summon in Code4Lib describes how OSU made their data display more tidily

Links of interest 25/3/10

Resources
C-SPAN Video Library “indexes, and archives all C-SPAN programming for historical, educational, research, and archival uses.” (Content is primarily US politics but see here for overlap with other subject areas.) All programs since 1987 can be viewed online for free.

Twitter
Following in the popular footsteps of the Fake AP Stylebook Twitter account (“Use a hyphen to join words together, a dash to separate two words that really don’t like each other.”) come rival accounts Fake AACR2 (“2.17B1. Describe an illustrated item as instructed in 2.5C. Optionally, add woodcuts, metal cuts, paper cuts, etc., as appropriate.”) and Fake RDA (“2.3.3 When attempting to parallel title, line title up to proper title, put title in reverse, turn left, shift into drive, turn right.”)

Neat stuff

Embedding chat widgets within EBSCO databases
Darien [Public] Library offers prizes to Foursquare checkins at their library
Lincoln University uses their page on Facebook to promote their own Foursquare check-in and to chat with students about famous pranks
Crowdsourcing: How and why should libraries do it? includes a huge number of examples of successful crowdsourced projects (ie projects where the bulk of the work has been done by individuals of the general public a few bits at a time) and what has made them successful
Common Craft have made a new “Augmented Reality” video in their “in plain English” series

Links of interest 2/2/10

Foursquare
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.

Some recent blogposts discussing the value of Foursquare for libraries (read the comments as well!) include:

Publishing scandals du jour
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).

In case you’re curious about non-Amazon options, there’s a number of online bookstores in New Zealand and I’ve recently discovered The Book Depository in the UK with free international shipping.

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”.