Enhancements to the Catalog

For many years, the library has subscribed to Syndetics for the book jackets that appear in our online catalog. They also offered 1st chapters, synopses, series info, and author background along with a few other options. Syndetics got their database of goodies from various publishers.

To this service, we added LibraryThing for Libraries (LTFL) for related titles, versions/editions, tags, and reading levels. If you are not familiar with LibraryThing, the company has been around for many years and has a database provided by 2 million book lovers who have cataloged their home collections and offered reviews of them to the world.

The two companies have now joined forces in a single catalog enhancement product - Syndetics Unbound. The benefit is an extended package of catalog enhancements that we didn't have access to in the past including info on video games, DVDs, music CDs, and audiobooks along with more details on books.

Here is a list of what is now available:

  • Cover art
  • Summary
  • About the Author (with a picture)
  • More by this Author
  • Look inside (may include 1st chapter, excerpt, table of contents)
  • Series with an option to see the entire series - any titles we don't own are pictured with their covers grayed out
  • You May Also Like... - includes top picks, titles by similar authors, readers' suggest, more by tag, same genre, same author, same series - all these come from the LT database
  • Professional Reviews (including New York Times)
  • Reader Reviews
  • Tags - subjects of books that non-library people would think of, like, stalking, liars, TV series
  • Book profile - about the book. You can search attributes, time period, genre, topics, characters, occupation of characters, etc. for related titles from book profiles.
  • Reading level - Lexile and grade/age levels - can get suggestions for other titles in this range
  • Awards - not just the big awards, but local as well
  • Also Available As - different formats of the title that we have
  • Video and Music
  • Video Games

Here are a few examples of the enhancements:

There is a lot of great stuff now available in our catalog. The new info will be found below our cataloged information and will start with the heading: More From Syndetics Unbound. If you have any questions about these features, please ask one of our staff members.