Koha+Cover+Images

One task that always needs done is making sure the books in our catalog have cover images associated with them whenever possible. Koha, our library catalog, pulls the front cover images from Google Books (books.google.com) using each book's ISBN. That means in order for the cover image to show up in our catalog search results, two things have to match up:
 * 1) Google Books has to have the title in their index, and the title must be associated with the cover image.
 * 2) The first ISBN entered in our catalog record must match the ISBN Google Books has on file, with no other punctuation or text entered into the ISBN field.

So, if you ever come across books that don't have cover images associated with them, you can check to see if the situation can be resolved by taking a look at the ISBN field under the record. (In library-speak, the official name for the library database record is "MARC Record.")


 * 1) Find a book in the catalog that doesn't have a cover image associated with it.
 * 2) From the staff client, see if the ISBN has extra punctuation (hyphens, spaces, colons, a dollar amount). Delete any extraneous punctuation from within the ISBN. Move a dollar amount into the "Terms of Availability" field following the "International Standard Book Number" field. Numerals should be the ONLY characters in the 020 (a) International Standard Book Number field.
 * 3) Copy this ISBN and paste into a Google Book Search in another window or browser tab. (Visit [] )
 * 4) If the number pulls up a listing that contains the book cover image, you know the cover image feature should now work! Go back to Koha and hit "Save" at the top of the page. (If you get a funny error or warning message, scroll down to step ___ below to see how to handle that.)
 * 5) If the number doesn't pull up a cover image, go get the book off the shelf, and using the title and author, try searching for the book and see if you can find a Google Book entry that shows that same cover image. If not, don't worry about it. Just save your Koha changes and forget about it. If you DO find another entry that matches, keep going.
 * 6) In your Koha browser window/tab, click the little icon next to the words INTERNATIONAL STANDARD BOOK NUMBER that looks like a little rectangle (just to the left of a rectangel with a red X over it.) This button will create an additional ISBN field.
 * 7) Cut the ISBN number from the first ISBN field, and paste it into the second ISBN field.
 * 8) From the Google Books entry that matches your book cover, scroll down the page until you see the book's ISBN. Copy the ISBN.
 * 9) Go back to Koha and paste the ISBN you copied from Google Books into the first ISBN field. Then click the save button up at the top of the Koha page.
 * 10) If you get an error message like the one shown here:
 * 11) Fill in field ___ with the: OhDaMVS
 * 12) Fill in field ____ with _____
 * 13) Fill in the ___ field on tab 9 with the appropriate item type for the item. (Nonfiction, Picture Book, LS fiction, Fiction, etc)