A presentation from Ian Pattenden from Bowker about their ‘Syndetic Solutions’ OPAC enrichment product.
Obviously really a sales pitch, but I find this an interesting area – do cover shots ‘enhance’ an academic library catalogue, or are they superfluous, and a distraction from the real business of looking for library material?
Syndetic Solutions provides 17 ‘data elements’ for OPAC enrichment – cover shots, tables of contents, sample chapters, author notes, reviews, etc. (see below) and the currently cover 2.8 million books, and growing.
One issue I have with this service is that it is hosted, so the information doesn’t get integrated into your catalogue. Ian is presenting this as ‘simple’, but for me it is a wasted opportunity. If we are going to add ToC to our catalogue, I’d like them to be searchable.
The links are done by ISBN, which means that it doesn’t apply to any of our Audio-Visual material of course, as well as items without ISBNs.
The data elements available are:
Cover images (1.7 million, increasing by 10k per week)
First chapters and Excerpts (from books published from 2000 onwards)
Tables of Contents (about 800,000, rising to 1 million by the end of 2007)
Summaries and Annotations (taken from book jackets and publishers)
Book Reviews and Author notes
Awards (e.g. Pulitzer Prize etc.)
Series (e.g. fiction series in reading order)
Profiles/Search for similar titles (e.g. based on the fact a book is about a single mother detective, you can find other books about single mother detectives)
Some examples
http://aleph.aub.auc.dk
http://nuin.napier.ac.uk
More detail is available at http://www.syndetics.com, and Bowker can do you a ISBN match report before you buy the service (they find match rates vary between 30% and 60%). Price is based on the number of English Language books for academic libraries, or annual circulation for other libraries
Finally, free trial access is also possible (apparently there is an Ex Libris KB item – KB6850 – on how to set this up).
You need an “i” in napier.
I like Syndetics, although I’d like to see it made easier to customise: on the Bowker side, it should be easier for customers to adjust the interface to brand it fit in with their OPAC, and on the Ex Libris side it would be good to have more control over how the cover image is integrated into the bib display.
Thanks for the correction – got that right now.
The issue about displaying the cover image in the OPAC came up in discussion in fact – there is definitely a demand to display it at brief result list level, whereas in Aleph (the Ex Libris ILS) you can only display it at full record level.
Of course, displaying for every item in a list of 10 or more books in a brief display comes with an overhead on processing and network traffic, but clearly something that the libraries want to do…
Absolutely. I was surprised that functionality wasn’t there, having seen it in other types of OPAC. Hopefully, Ex Libris will add that functionality – it can’t be too complex to do.
Hi Owen,
I talked to you in Stockholm about using the X-server of Aleph and Metalib to connect the Edu-Portal.
About Syndetics, we have set this up in our Aleph16 since april this year and it works great. Not only for images, also for more content information like TOC, Abstract and Reviews.
Please take a look in our catalog, search for instance for the item ISBN 0-684-82800-6 and see how we have done it.
This is the ‘ugly’ default Ex Libris setup and off course we would like to customise this.
Use the UBUlink button to see what services our SFX delivers.
There are some problems with Syndetics. They have a wrong concept of identifying edtions by ISBN in their database. That is why a book that has two similar editions by content and only differ by way of binding (paperback or hardcover) can have two different records in their database, having different links attached to these records.
Examples:
ISBN: 0-7456-1429-9
ISBN: 0-7456-1428-0
Click on the link in the ISBN field of the full display to see how each edition has its own services in Syndetics.
I suggested them to normalize this but haven’t heard from them eversince.
Br,
Theo
Hi Owen,
I talked to you in Stockholm about using the X-server of Aleph and Metalib to connect the Edu-Portal.
About Syndetics, we have set this up in our Aleph16 since april this year and it works great. Not only for images, also for more content information like TOC, Abstract and Reviews.
Please take a look in our catalog, search for instance for the item ISBN 0-684-82800-6 and see how we have done it.
This is the ‘ugly’ default Ex Libris setup and off course we would like to customise this.
Use the UBUlink button to see what services our SFX delivers.
There are some problems with Syndetics. They have a wrong concept of identifying edtions by ISBN in their database. That is why a book that has two similar editions by content and only differ by way of binding (paperback or hardcover) can have two different records in their database, having different links attached to these records.
Examples:
ISBN: 0-7456-1429-9
ISBN: 0-7456-1428-0
Click on the link in the ISBN field of the full display to see how each edition has its own services in Syndetics.
I suggested them to normalize this but haven’t heard from them eversince.
Br,
Theo