This charming cover for a book about travels in the seas around and in the land of Australia is now available online in the Keys Catalog and in the Open Library:
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| Cover of Hezekiah Butterworth's Zigzag Journeys in Australia |
If the work has an ISBN, then Keys will automatically pull a cover image from an Open Library record. This is a feature of the Koha open-source catalog software that powers Keys, that's easily selected in the system administration.
But what about older works, such as this one, that predate the ISBN system? First we check the Open Library record to see if a cover image is available. If not, then we scan the cover, and upload it to Keys. We also upload it to the Open Library so that it can be available to the world.
Uploading to Open Library is easy--you don't even have to log in! No Open Library account is necessary, although accounts are free if you'd like one, and they allow you to improve the book descriptions. To contribute covers, their system for adding covers just requires a couple of clicks to either upload an image from your computer, or paste in the address of a cover image from the web. It's quick to do, and is an easy way to make wonderful aspects of books available to all!
