This is a web page/app for the dynamic and interactive display of new multicultural books that have recently come into the libraries. These books are either currently or have been on display in the Dow Chemical Multicultural Resource Center (DowMRC) on Hale Library's 3rd floor. The books are physically and virtually displayed with their book covers making for a colorful and often times eye-catching display. Countless a weary student has wondered by the DowMRC and, to their surprise, caught glimpse of an interesting book on the New Multicultural Resources shelves (who said an academic library can't be fun?!). Selected primarily for their relationship to culture, identity, and social movements (and sometimes just a really interesting book cover!), these books are available for checkout. As many of the books on this page were previously on display, do check the libraries catalog paying special attention to the book's location before wandering up to the 3rd floor.

This interactive webpage/app encourages the user to discover new books in serendipitously fun ways by allowing the user to manipulate the books by display month, preset library categories (labels), user-generated categories (tags), or the user's very own search terms. The page/app itself displays some basic information about each book and then links you to either the Google Books preview of the book or the Libraries catalog page of the book (Google Book preview links from the book cover images, if available, where book titles link to the catalog - hover to see where it links). The preset library labels are a combination of categories derived from the Library of Congress classification system and core categorizations related to culture, identity, and social movements. The user-generated tags are categories created by users not satisfied with the preset library labels. With tags, the page/app utilizes the collective knowledge of the masses to organize the books in a truly distributed and democratic fashion. To edit/add tags yourself, simply click on a book and find the link "edit tags". From there you can drag and drop new tags, remove tags you think don't accurately portray the book, or create your own tag (subject to human approval).

This page/app has been in development for a long time and was built from the ground up with little support and labor. For more information about it, how it was created, or support, please contact Kevin at kjc6688@gw.ksu.edu. There are still many features and much optimization that awaits development: integrated book descriptions, larger book covers, cleaned up code, superimposed titles on blank covers, other ideas?

*** While generally cross-browser supported, there are a few bugs with certain browsers. If something is going wrong, see if another browser fixes it.