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Record identifiers such as ISBN or OCLC are sent to book cover providers, which return an image that is displayed in the Primo search results. Most covers come from one of two providers. You can right-click on an image and Inspect Element to see the source of the image.
Google Book Search
Use Google Direct Links to see if Google associates the right metadata/cover with the identifier (try multiple identifiers):
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- Base URL: https://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC[insert number here not including square brackets]
- Example: https://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC1021859160
- You may also need to try OCLC numbers from 035 $z
ISBN number
- Base URL: https://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN[insert number here not including square brackets, omit hyphens]
- Example: https://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN9780991262519
- You may need to try multiple ISBs
Sample message to Google when the error is on their end
We display book covers from Google in our catalog. A user has reported an error. When we send this identifier to Google:
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- Multiple identifiers are tested: OCLC, ISBN, LCCN, in that order.
- How to troubleshoot an incorrect Google Books cover thumbnail (Ex Libris Knowledge Base article)
- Local troubleshooting. There will be slight variations depending on what browser you are using.
- If you hover over a book cover image and right click and choose "Inspect Element," the developer bar in your browser will show the source link of the image. This is how you can tell if it came from Google.
- To find out which identifiers we sent to Google when checking to see if they had a book cover, first search by MMS ID to make sure the record in question is the ONLY search result.
- Next, open the Developer bar if not already open. (You can just inspect element again to open the bar).
- Switch to the Network tab of the developer bar, and clear existing lines by using the trash icon
- Refresh the page
- Use the gear icon or search box to filter the URL list by typing "google" to see just google traffic.
- Depending on your browser, you will see a line for either "bibkeys" or "books"
- Click on the headers tab to see the identifiers that Harvard sent Google, e.g. :
- Click on the preview tab to see what Google sent back to Harvard for each identifier:
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- The "thumbnail_url" is the link to the cover image
- The other URLs will go to pages in Google Book Search, where you may see additional information to help with troubleshooting
- If you hover over a book cover image and right click and choose "Inspect Element," the developer bar in your browser will show the source link of the image. This is how you can tell if it came from Google.
Syndetics
- Only ISBNs are used for cover identification
- How to report an error in a Syndetics book cover (Ex Libris Knowledge Base article)
- The troubleshooting steps listed above should work for Syndetics troubleshooting as well. Use 'syndetics' instead of 'google" when filtering the list of URLs in the Network tab.
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