Including cover pictures in bibliography

Question

Multimedia entry types, i.e. artwork, audio, image, movie, music, performance, video, software, are not well supported by biblatex yet, although there are already fields defined for their unique identifiers: isan (audiovisual), ismn (music), iswc (musical work); cf. isbn (book), isrn (report) and issn (serial).

Many of these, like some books, are quickly identified by their cover image(s). Therefore a bibliography that only or mostly contains such entries (instead of online resources, journal articles and technical reports) could benefit from thumbnail pictures being displayed next to the text.

Are there any biblatex styles that support such a thing? Otherwise, how could one best achieve that?

I assume one should start with a custom field in the .bib file like cover, coverimage, coverpicture, coverfile, coverurl or more generic thumbnail, screenshot, logo, icon, photo, picture or image.

PS: Let’s put copyright considerations aside for a moment and assume that it’s fair use or covered by citation rules.

Answer 1

You might see this as a proof-of-concept, I will gladly take any input and comments on this idea.

We define a new field thumbnail to hold the path to the cover image, thumbnail, ... what have you

\DeclareDatamodelFields[type=field, datatype=verbatim]{thumbnail}
\DeclareDatamodelEntryfields{thumbnail}

An entry might look like this

@book{uthor,
  author    = {Uthor, Arnold},
  title     = {A Big Book},
  publisher = {P. Ublisher \& Co.},
  location  = {Someplace},
  thumbnail = {coverimage.png},
}

Where, of course, coverimage.png is in the same folder as the master .tex file.

We define a helper function

\newcommand*{\insertbibimage}[1]{\includegraphics[width=50px, keepaspectratio]{#1}}

Here you can use all the graphics formatting of \includegraphics.

Finally, the image will be printed after the entry in a new line.

\renewbibmacro*{finentry}{\finentry
  \iffieldundef{thumbnail}
    {}
    {\\\usefield{\insertbibimage}{thumbnail}}}

The following redefinition prints the image in the margin and does not disturb the rest of the bibliography in such a brisk manner as the definition above

\renewbibmacro*{finentry}{\finentry
  \iffieldundef{thumbnail}
    {}
    {\marginpar{\usefield{\insertbibimage}{thumbnail}}}}

MWE

\documentclass[british,a4paper]{scrartcl}
\usepackage{filecontents}
\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage[autostyle=true]{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=authoryear, backend=biber]{biblatex}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{hyperref}

\DeclareDatamodelFields[type=field, datatype=verbatim]{thumbnail}
\DeclareDatamodelEntryfields{thumbnail}

\newcommand*{\insertbibimage}[1]{\includegraphics[width=50px, keepaspectratio]{#1}}
\renewbibmacro*{finentry}{\finentry
  \iffieldundef{thumbnail}
    {}
    {\\\usefield{\insertbibimage}{thumbnail}}}

\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@book{uthor,
  author    = {Uthor, Arnold},
  title     = {A Big Book},
  publisher = {P. Ublisher \& Co.},
  location  = {Someplace},
  thumbnail = {coverimage.png},
}
\end{filecontents*}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}
  \nocite{*}
  \printbibliography
\end{document}

The wonderful sample image is

save it as coverimage.png