Covers and images

Lyra fetches book covers from ISBNdb, a commercial book-metadata dataset keyed by ISBN. Cover lookup runs inline with the catalog import, whatever the file was: every record that carries an ISBN and no cover of its own — a MARC record, or a Books by ISBN spreadsheet row — has ISBNdb called for it as the import runs, and whatever comes back is saved. By the time the import results page loads, cover lookups for that batch are done.

Automatic ISBNdb lookup runs on import. It does not run on manual item creation, and editing an ISBN on an existing record doesn’t silently re-fetch the cover. You’re not stuck with whatever the import found, though; see I want to add a cover manually below.

This page covers the common surprises.

A new item has no cover

Two possible causes:

The ISBN isn’t in the ISBNdb dataset

ISBNdb is large but not exhaustive. Books that may not be covered:

Older or rare titles without a clean ISBN.
Self-published works that didn’t get formal ISBN registration.
Foreign-language editions that ISBNdb has under a different ISBN than the one you imported.
Pre-1970 books with 9-digit SBNs rather than 10- or 13-digit ISBNs.

If a title has no ISBN at all, Lyra has nothing to look up against and the cover slot stays empty.

The ISBN is wrong

A typo in the ISBN field, or an ISBN that was correctly typed but belongs to a different edition than the one you carry, produces either no cover or the wrong cover.

Validate the ISBN against a known source (Amazon, Google Books). With the correct ISBN in hand, fix the edition’s ISBN on the item and then re-detect the cover with the button: Via ISBN option (see I want to add a cover manually).

The cover is wrong

A common case: a title has a cover, but it’s the cover of a different edition or a completely different book.

The cause is almost always the ISBN points at a different edition. ISBNs are per-edition, and ISBNdb returns the cover for the specific edition. If your item has the ISBN of the 1995 paperback but you physically carry the 2018 hardcover, you’ll get the 1995 paperback’s cover.

Three paths:

Live with it. The book is the same; the cover difference is cosmetic.
Re-detect from the correct ISBN. Set the edition’s ISBN to the correct one, then use button: Via ISBN to re-fetch.
Set the cover by hand. Point the cover at a specific image URL, or upload an image file. See I want to add a cover manually.

Multiple copies, one item, but the cover only loaded for one

The cover is on the item, not the copy. There’s one cover per item, shared across all copies. If you see a cover on one copy but not another, what you’re actually seeing is the item-level cover applied to a copy view; the other copy is the same item with the same cover.

If two copies have visibly different covers, they’re not the same item, they’re two different items. This sometimes happens after a catalog import that produced near-duplicate item records. Fold them together with Merge items in the staff app.

A whole batch imported without covers

Since cover lookup runs inline with import, a batch that finished with no covers means ISBNdb either returned nothing for those ISBNs or wasn’t reachable when the import ran.

ISBNdb rate-limited or had a maintenance window. Possible, though uncommon during a single import run.
A change in ISBNdb’s API. Vendor-side API changes are rare but happen.
The ISBNs themselves aren’t in ISBNdb’s dataset. Spot-check a few against ISBNdb’s site; if they’re missing there, they’ll be missing for us too.

If a recent import is entirely cover-less and the ISBNs look valid, email support.

Covers look stretched or low-resolution

ISBNdb returns covers at varying resolutions. A small image scaled up looks pixelated; a non-square aspect ratio rendered in a square slot looks letterboxed.

Lyra doesn’t re-process, upscale, crop, or stretch covers; the image you see is what the dataset returned, so the cover quality is the dataset’s cover quality. In both the OPAC and the staff app, Lyra renders covers with a reasonable default (preserve aspect ratio, cap maximum dimensions).

I want to add a cover manually

You can. Open the item, choose menu item: Edit item… from the button: Actions menu, and use the cover control. It offers three ways to set the image:

button: Custom URL. Paste a direct link to an image and Lyra uses it as the cover.
button: Upload file. Upload an image from your computer (for example, a photo of the physical cover or a scan).
button: Via ISBN. Re-detect the cover from the edition’s ISBN through ISBNdb, useful after correcting a wrong ISBN.

Whatever you set this way sticks; it isn’t overwritten by a later automatic lookup. Step-by-step instructions are on the editing items page.

The cover is on the item, so it applies to every copy of that item. Items left without a cover display a default placeholder in both the staff app and the OPAC, on the item page and in every list or table the item appears in.