Two years ago we introduced BrowZine, a powerful, digital browsing experience for academic journals, and now we are trialing a similar product for popular magazines. Until the end of October, you can browse, flip through, and read the more than 650 magazines available on Flipster, a digital newsstand for anytime access on your computer or mobile device. Magazines in Flipster have true-to-life layout with all the full color pictures and advertisements.

Flipster allows you to browse the latest issues of high quality digital versions of popular magazines, courtesy of the library. As I said, our current trial includes their entire collection of magazines, but in the event that we subscribe to Flipster, we would have to pick and choose which titles we could offer. It may also be the case that we HAVE to subscribe to certain titles through Flipster, because rumor has it, titles such as Science News may ONLY be available to us in the future through Flipster.

Flipster has many features designed to give readers an easy and fun digital reading experience. You can browse magazines by category as well as perform searches for specific magazines. An online newsstand provides a carousel of the most recent issues, as well as a carousel of all issues allowing for quick access to magazines. The table of contents contains links to quickly go to articles of interest and hotlinks within magazines are hyperlinked, opening in separate tabs when clicked. In addition, there is an option to zoom in and out for better readability.

Please check out this fun resource before our trial ends on October 31. Send any feedback and which magazines you would like to see it host to Meg Manahan <mkmanahan@stthomas.edu>, or leave your comments below.

It’s that wonderful time of year again when, twice a year, once in fall semester and again in spring semester, we trial new products. Throughout the month you’ll see a wide variety of products we are considering for purchase. Please stop by every few days, take these resources for a test drive and comment – either directly on the blog or privately to the librarian (email addresses will be provided) if you feel we should add this resource to our collection.

RESOLVED. And just like that, all of the Gale databases have returned.  Please let us know if you are experiencing otherwise.

We have over 30 databases from a company called Gale and they just informed us that they are having technical difficulties on their end.  If you are trying to use the following and are experiencing problems, we apologize on behalf of Gale. Please contact a librarian to see if there’s an alternative source or watch this page for updates on when the resources are working again.