Syndetics Unbound

Syndetics Unbound includes more than a dozen distinct enrichment elements for your catalog. Everything is included in one package. Simply disable any elements that you don't want.

• Premium Cover Service — Syndetics Unbound offers the most comprehensive cover database in existence for libraries — over 25 million full-color cover images for books, videos, DVDs, and CDs, with thousands of new covers added every week. If a cover is missing for an item, Syndetics Unbound automatically generates a cover using the title, author, and media type.
• Summary — Over 18 million summaries and annotations covering fiction, non-fiction, and both trade and scholarly titles. Thousands of summaries are added each week.
• About the Author — This section includes the author biography and a shelf of other items by the author. The section is also adorned by a small author photo.
• Look Inside — Includes first chapters, book excerpts, and table of contents for millions of titles, enabling patrons to take a peek inside a book.
• Series — Shows a book's series, including the reading order. If the library is missing part of the series, those covers are shown, but grayed out.
• You May Also Like — Provides sharp, on-the-spot readers' advisory in your catalog, with the option to browse a larger world of suggestions, drawn from LibraryThing members and big-data algorithms. As with other enrichments, Syndetics Unbound only recommends items that your library owns.
• Professional Reviews — More than 5.4 million reviews are available from:
  • Library Journal
  • School Library Journal
  • New York Times
  • The Guardian
  • The Horn Book
  • BookList
  • BookSeller + Publisher Magazine
  • Choice
  • Publishers Weekly
  • Kirkus
  • A la carte professional review options also include:
  • Voice of Youth Advocates: VOYA
  • Doody’s Medical Reviews
  • Quill and Quire
• Reader Reviews and Ratings — Includes more than 1.7 million vetted reader reviews from LibraryThing members. It also allows patrons and librarians to add their own ratings and reviews, right in their library’s catalog, and then showcase them on a library's home page and social media.
• Also Available As — Help patrons find other available formats and versions of a title in your collection, including paper, audio, ebook, and translations.
• Tags — The Tags element updates LibraryThing's celebrated tag clouds — redesigning them toward simplicity and consistency. Based on over 141 million tags created by LibraryThing members, tags are hand-vetted by our staff librarians for quality. A new exploration interface allows patrons to combine and filter tags, to focus in on the genres, subjects, and other categories they want most.
• Book Profile — A newly dynamic version of what Bowker has done for years — analyzing thousands of new works of fiction, short story collections, biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs annually. With Syndetics Unbound every term is clickable, and patrons can search and browse over one million profiles.
• Reading Level — See and explore other books in the same age and grade range. Reading Level also includes Metametrics Lexile® Framework for Reading.
• Awards — Highlights the awards a title has won, and helps patrons find highly-awarded books in your collection. Includes well-known awards, like the National Book Award and the Booker Prize, but also smaller awards like the Bram Stoker Award and Oklahoma's Sequoyah Book Award.
• Browse Shelf — Gives your patrons the context and serendipity of browsing a physical shelf, using your call numbers. Includes a mini shelf-browser that sits on your detail pages, and a full-screen version, launched from the detail page.
• Video and Music — Syndetics Unbound offers a wealth of descriptive information for more than 4 million video and music titles including annotations, performers, track listings, release dates, genres, keywords, and themes.
• Video Games — The video game element enriches your catalog with game covers, ESRB Rating, Star Rating, Game Information, System Requirements, Game Features, Game Description, Game Reviews, and Screenshots.

We have just released a major new feature for Syndetics Unbound. The feature adapts Syndetics Unbound to our present moment, highlighting and promoting libraries' electronic collections. We hope it will prove useful to you during this time of physical closure and electronic interest.

Learn more about this feature on the LibraryThing blog post.

New: Use one one of our logos here to let patrons know to keep an eye out for electronic collections in your catalog.

If activated, the new feature:

• Boosts electronic resources. "You May Also Like" and other lists now prefer electronic editions of titles, and surface more electronic resources overall.
• Marks all electronic resources with an attractive "e" icon.
• Adds a message to the top of the Syndetics Unbound section of your page, explaining what the "e" means. You can modify this message.

We believe this feature should be enabled by every library affected by the Coronavirus. But we are leaving it up to you to turn it on—and customize it as you see fit. If you don't turn it on, your catalog will see no changes, and your electronic collections will not be enhanced and promoted.

You can choose how much to boost your electronic resources as opposed to print, using the slider from "No Boost" to "High."

To turn this function on in your Syndetics Unbound Admin, go to the "Catalog Enrichments" page. Then choose the "Electronic Resources" option on the left menu.

How to Enable: