[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Uploading Cover Images?

[Dan Scott]

Sure... but the advantage of the OpenLibrary route is that a) the plugin
already exists and b) you can get more from OpenLibrary than just
covers, for free - just tables of content today, mind you, but the same
principle could be used to pull the description, first sentence, etc
from the OpenLibrary metadata that's returned by the call.

LibraryThing offers more than just covers to Evergreen systems via
LibraryThing for Libraries (http://www.librarything.com/forlibraries/),
but that's a paid service.

Getting back to added content, it's a bit of a painful limitation to be
limited to selecting only a single service provider. I dream of the
ability to stack added content services so that a library could tell
their Evergreen system to check OpenLibrary, LibraryThing, Google Books,
Amazon, Syndetic, SOPAC Insurge, publisher services, etc for cover
images, reviews, etc, so that sites could provide the best coverage, or
pick and choose services. 

For example: we might be happy with the covers provided by OpenLibrary,
but be willing to pay Syndetic for their reviews. In the existing
architecture we would have to create a custom added content Perl module
to achieve that goal.

There are other pieces of open source software that have already covered
some of this ground - Umlaut, for example - and it might be a good thing
to borrow or integrate that work, rather than continuing to roll our
own. But that level of refactoring would require significant work, too,
so until somebody has the time to invest, we can keep rolling with what
we've got. OpenLibrary is the only service provider that I'm aware of to
which libraries can contribute cover images and their own added content
and that content is then freely and immediately available to others to
use, which is why I lean in its direction.

While I'm day-dreaming and totally on a tangent, I'd love to see
somebody take advantage of the very low-hanging fruit of augmenting
their catalogue records by turning the tables of contents / author
notes / etc available from OpenLibrary and often from loc.gov itself
into proper MARC fields to enhance keyword searching. Should be easy to
do... maybe as a hackfest project, if nobody gets around to it before
then.

Dan

On Mon, 2009-12-07 at 10:48 -0600, Josh Stompro wrote:
> Another similar option would be to create or update entries in 
> librarything, (http://www.librarything.com).  You could add the cover 
> art and then use the librarything cover art service.  
> http://www.librarything.com/blog/2008/08/million-free-covers-from-librarything.php  
> 
> 
> It could be that there is some crossover between librarything and 
> openlibrary, so by adding cover art to one it shows up in the other, but 
> I'm just speculating... looks like maybe not.
> "*In the past, we had been talking to the Open Libary 
> <http://openlibrary.org/> project about a joint effort. We even sent 
> them all our covers and a key to the identifiers that linked them. But 
> nothing came of it. To some extent that was our fault, and to some 
> extent not. (I think them and us would differ on the blame here.) In any 
> case, I was tired of the time and transactional friction, and wanted to 
> try a different approach." (from page above)
> 
> Josh
> 
> Dan Scott wrote:
> > On Sun, 2009-12-06 at 08:44 -0500, Ryan wrote:
> >   
> >> Hi all,
> >> It seems we have hit a bump in using Evergreen, we have a collection
> >> of cook books that need to be cataloged. These cook books are
> >> fundraiser cook books so they are not sold by Amazon or cataloged by
> >> the Library of Congress. We can catalog the books with out a problem
> >> but can we scan the cover images and upload them to our Evergreen
> >> server? Where would these files have to be placed if so?
> >>   
> >>     
> >
> > You could catalog them in OpenLibrary (http://openlibrary.org/), upload
> > the cover images there, and use the OpenLibrary added content plugin
> > instead of Amazon
> > (http://svn.open-ils.org/trac/ILS/browser/trunk/Open-ILS/src/perlmods/OpenILS/WWW/AddedContent/OpenLibrary.pm) - which didn't make it into 1.6.0.0, unfortunately, but should work as-is if you pull it directly from trunk.
> >
> >   
>