Judging by the Covers
You may have noticed the covers of new acquisitions appearing on the homepage. Over the past year, we've worked to add tables of contents, summaries, reviews, and cover images to FRANCIS through ContentCafe, a third-party vendor. All of these additions help our users make informed choices about the materials in our collection. Now we're bringing some of this content right to the library homepage and new acquisitions list, with the goal of making our collections more exciting and accessible.
ContentCafe Cover images make it easy to see at a glance what the library has been acquiring, and whether the material might be worth a closer look. For example, imagine a student doing a paper on black power in the sixties. She searched FRANCIS for "civil rights" and "african americans", and the book The Selma of the North caught her eye with its image of a white priest and black teenagers. The catalog has eight different subject headings for this book, but she still might not be sure the book is just what she needs for her paper. So she follows the Look Inside button, and finds a summary of the book and a table of contents at her fingertips.
From the summary she learns that the struggle for civil rights in Milwaukee culminated with the 1967 open housing campaign, in which "A white Catholic priest, James Groppi, led the NAACP Youth Council and Commandos in a militant struggle that lasted for 200 consecutive nights and provoked the ire of thousands of white residents." That sounds promising, but the table of contents is even more informative. Not only does the book include a map of Milwaukee civil rights landmarks, but it has an entire chapter on black power politics. Now our imaginary student knows that it's worth a trip to the stacks to see this book. If it's checked out, she knows whether to bother with requesting it from another library.
We are constantly working to improve our collections through new acquisitions, while improving access to the collections through enhanced interfaces. Cover images on the homepage and in the catalog serve both of these purposes, highlighting new additions and making them more accessible. We hope you enjoy this new feature, and all of the extra content we're working to include.
ContentCafe Cover images make it easy to see at a glance what the library has been acquiring, and whether the material might be worth a closer look. From the summary she learns that the struggle for civil rights in Milwaukee culminated with the 1967 open housing campaign, in which "A white Catholic priest, James Groppi, led the NAACP Youth Council and Commandos in a militant struggle that lasted for 200 consecutive nights and provoked the ire of thousands of white residents." That sounds promising, but the table of contents is even more informative. Not only does the book include a map of Milwaukee civil rights landmarks, but it has an entire chapter on black power politics. Now our imaginary student knows that it's worth a trip to the stacks to see this book. If it's checked out, she knows whether to bother with requesting it from another library.
We are constantly working to improve our collections through new acquisitions, while improving access to the collections through enhanced interfaces. Cover images on the homepage and in the catalog serve both of these purposes, highlighting new additions and making them more accessible. We hope you enjoy this new feature, and all of the extra content we're working to include.