The RCL Librarians have joined Syndetics Unbound! We are now featuring select Resources for College Libraries (RCL) titles in Librarian Recommends: Lists, combining the quality of RCL titles curated by Choice/ACRL subject specialists with the powerful discovery features of Syndetics Unbound for library catalogs. These lists draw from the RCL database featuring more than 90,000 core titles for academic libraries and make it easy for libraries to explore new content vetted by RCL subject experts.
In March we released Librarian Recommends: Cover Upload, much to the delight of our customers. Librarian Recommends: Cover Upload allows librarians to source, upload, and display cover images for items in the catalog that were either missing an image or were incorrect. This element was originally intended for book, video, and journal images, but what surprised us were how many librarians are using it to showcase the wide variety of materials that libraries collect.
Syndetics Unbound has released Audio Clips, part of the Look Inside element, which allows users to listen to a snippet of the audiobook. This enhancement includes an audio player that contains a sample sound bite from the audiobook, so that patrons can hear an excerpt. Audio Clips give patrons the chance to discover the narration of a title they may be interested in, and is another useful way to curate their reading list.
Introducing the new Bowker Book Data website. ProQuest and LibraryThing, the co-developers of Syndetics Unbound, have announced Bowker Book Data, a new website for anyone interested in high-quality book data. Check out the website here: https://bowkerbookdata.proquest.com. Find out More The power of Syndetics Unbound comes from a combination of detailed, comprehensive data delivered and a simple, easy-to-implement architecture. A single line of code added to a library catalog or other book-world system brings everything alive, from enhancing records with data to rich exploratory features, such as similar books, series lists and professional reviews.
Did you know that if your library subscribes to Ebook Central’s Academic Complete, your instance of Ebook Central contains elements of Syndetics Unbound to help highlight the titles in your Ebook Central Collections? Many libraries use Academic Complete as the beginning foundation to their ebook collection. Syndetics Unbound displays some elements within Ebook Central to highlight and enrich those titles. Academic Complete subscribers get the added value of 7 of the 18 available enrichment elements within the Ebook Central Platform, which include You May Also Like, About the Author, Awards, Reader Reviews, Tags, AltMetrics and RCL Core Titles.
In recent years, April 23rd has been a special day for the employees of ProQuest. It has been a time to recognize and celebrate World Book Day, also known as World Book and Copyright Day. This annual event first started on April 23, 1995, organized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), to promote reading, publishing, and copyright. As a company whose entire business revolves around books and libraries, ProQuest has celebrated this day in years past by encouraging employees to dress up as characters from their favorite books.
Syndetics Unbound’s Book Profile is a dynamic tool that lets users browse for titles using clickable profile terms, like character names, genres, topics, locations, and more. There are two kinds of Book Profiles—those created by editorial staff, and machine generated profiles. Today’s blog post is a dive into how Book Profiles are created. Fiction and Non-Fiction Profiles are curated manually by Syndetics Unbound editorial staff members, who refer to descriptions and reviews found in Industry journals to create a profile for a given title, using standardized terms.
Last year, we queried our customers about what their favorite Syndetics Unbound elements were. Not surprisingly, Recommendations were at the top of that list, but let’s take a deeper look at what you love the most about Syndetics Unbound. Public and Academic Libraries alike rated our You May Also Like recommendations as their favorite element. The recommendations provide the opportunity for serendipitous discovery of new titles and are based on both user suggestions from LibraryThing for Libraries and big data algorithms.
