[OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] cover art

[Dan Scott]

On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 06:42:23PM -0800, Tara Robertson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I know it's possible to use commercial cover art and enhanced OPAC content
> with Evergreen. If it is possible, how hard would it be to do? (I realize
> this is a 'how long is a piece of string' kinda question.) I'm wondering if
> it's possible to have a local cover art collection and if anyone has done
> this...
> 
> Our library has an awesome artists' books collection and our users are
> visual people. It's unlikely that these titles would be included in a cover
> art subscription.
> 
> We're currently using Horizon, and this is not possible. It's not a deal
> breaker, but it's something that would be really nice.
> 
> I read the feature list for 2.0 and don't see it mentioned.

While Evergreen does offer the ability to use a local cover art
collection (http://markmail.org/message/sx7h4kpxzrleu4hc offers the
details), the approach that might offer lots of win all around would
be to use the OpenLibrary added content plugin (available in 1.6, it
only requires a small tweak to the opensrf.xml file, and it's the
default in 2.0) to provide cover art (+ table of contents where
available).

OpenLibrary.org lets you upload cover art for any book (and create
an entry for a book if they don't already have it listed); you don't
even need to sign up for an account. Evergreen will automatically query
OpenLibrary for a match based on ISBN and display the cover art - so
your artists will get coverage in your OPAC, as well as more exposure
via OpenLibrary directly and to every other library that pulls cover art
from OpenLibrary. Everyone wins!

If you find that OpenLibrary doesn't have your artists' books catalogued
already, you can send them a bulk upload of your MARC records
(http://openlibrary.org/data) to get them into place so that all you
would have to do is upload the cover art.