Book cover overview

Book covers help users quickly identify materials in search results, record pages, and lists.

Vega Discover uses a Syndetics Unbound subscription by default to generate book covers for materials in the Catalog. You can also configure Vega to use custom covers or Google Books as alternative sources, though these options may offer less complete coverage.

How Vega selects a cover

Each work in Vega Discover can include several formats (for example, book, eBook, or audiobook), and each format can include multiple editions.

Vega displays the cover of the most recently published edition in each format group. When a user switches between format tabs, the displayed cover updates automatically to show the most recent edition in the selected format.

If two editions share the same publication year, Vega displays the edition that appears first in the edition list.

When determining which cover to display, Vega follows the following order of priority:

  1. Custom book covers
    Covers created using 856 tags linking to an image file

  2. Syndetics Unbound covers
    Covers generated from identifier numbers, prioritized as follows:

    1. Monographs

      1. ISSN

      2. ISBN

      3. IAN/EAN (024 3_) (sent as a ISBN per Syndetics functionality)

      4. UPC

    2. Serials

      1. ISSN

      2. ISBN

      3. IAN/EAN (024 3_) (sent as a ISBN per Syndetics functionality)

      4. UPC

  3. Fallback covers

    If there are no identifiers available, Vega sends information to Syndetics Unbound, and/or uses the available metadata to generate a colored cover image showing the following information if available:

    1. Title

    2. Author

    3. Format

For views that don't display all formats of a work, such as homepage showcases, linked data showcases, bookmark lists, and saved searches, Vega uses a material-type priority to determine which format's cover is displayed.

Vega displays the highest-priority material type available. If several instances of that type exist, it selects the edition with the most recent publication date.

The following material-type priority is applied when selecting which cover to display:

  1. Book

  2. Large print book

  3. Audiobook

  4. eBook

  5. eAudiobook

  6. Blu-ray

  7. DVD

  8. Any remaining instances (Vega selects the most recently published edition)

See also