Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

Add covers to your LTFL enhancements

We’ve added a little cover image eye-candy to the LTFL Catalog Enhancements. You can now choose to display cover images along with the title/author text. You can turn on cover images for Similar books, Other editions and translations, and in tag browser. In the tag browser, you can also choose to display a mini tag cloud for each book in the list, to give it a little context.

Because a picture is worth a thousand words (click to see larger images):

Without covers With covers

If you already have Catalog Enhancements in your catalog, here’s how to turn it on:
1. In the LTFL admin pages, go to your Global Configuration page and fill in the cover image URL line. It uses whatever covers your library already uses in your OPAC (Syndetics, Content Cafe, etc.)

2. Go to each enhancement’s configure page and click the “Show Covers” box, or the “Show Mini Tag Cloud in Tags Browser” box.

Labels: covers, librarything for libraries, ltfl

10 Comments:

  1. John Scott says:

    Nice Work guys

    We have been looking forward to this new functionality. We will switch it on as soon as we can work out the correct syntax for Syndetics.

  2. John Scott says:

    Its up and Running. Here is an example http://preview.tinyurl.com/2wcjjbx. Many thanks LTFL nice work

  3. Gina says:

    So this enhancement will only work if you are getting your catalog cover images from a vendor like Syndetics or Content Cafe, correct? What about libraries who use Amazon, Open Library or LibraryThing for their cover images? Will this feature work in their catalogs?

  4. Abby says:

    Gina > it’ll work with any service you use to get covers!

  5. Vince says:

    We currently use Content Café for our book jackets and enhanced information in Millennium. We do not have Webridge or Millennium Research modes.
    We are looking to pull these images from Millennium to use on our app we are designing that allows patrons to check out materials right on the spot by scanning the barcode with their smart phone.
    Do you know of any options or alternatives to Content Cafe that would allow this to work?

    Thanks for any help you can provide.