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General information

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

There are several ways to troubleshoot incorrect cover images with Google. Use the partner support form to report errors.  

  1. You can plug the OCLC number into this URL: https://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC[insert number here], such as: https://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC1021859160. If this returns the wrong book data, it is an error on Google's end. See more, with examples of static URLs, here: https://developers.google.com/books/docs/static-links.

  2. Or, you can inspect the cover image in the browser:
  • 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. 
    1. 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.
    2. 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. 
    3. Next, open the Developer bar if not already open. (You can just inspect element again to open the bar). 
    4. Switch to the Network tab of the developer bar, and clear existing lines by using the trash icon
    5. Refresh the page
    6. Use the gear icon or search box to filter the URL list by typing "google" to see just google traffic. 
    7. Depending on your browser, you will see a line for either "bibkeys" or "books"
    8. Click on the headers tab to see the identifiers that Harvard sent Google, e.g. :
    10. Click on the preview tab to see what Google sent back to Harvard for each identifier:
    12. The "thumbnail_url" is the link to the cover image
    13. The other URLs will go to pages in Google Book Search, where you may see additional information to help with troubleshooting

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. 



Journals via Browzine

For any journals that are supported by Browzine, we use the cover images from Browzine, which are based on an ISSN match. 

Custom covers

Record that are part of  Scanned Key Content have book covers chosen by staff. These take precedence over covers provided by other sources.


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