Today saw the first Prism day to look at the new Prism and to see and hear from those at Talis talk about the new architecture behind it, the design aspects of the new interface, and how it can be extended.

Thirteen representatives of customers joined us at the Talis Birmingham offices.  As the first of these events it was very much a two way event, with Talis staff learning as much about how Prism is to be used and received, as customers understanding the things to be considered for a new Prism implementation.

Set in the context of the development of a whole new architecture and product fit to support and enable the needs of a discovery application with a ten year lifespan, the primary consideration is planning.  The implementation of Prism is a project, probably extending over several months, which requires engagement from the start of the library, IT, web teams and designers, and from the Talis  consultancy team.

Dave Robinson & Chris Waring from the Talis design team showed several stunning designs that have already been applied to some early adopter prism tenancies.  They also showed the Broadminster demonstration tenancy interface, which sported an animated book jacket carousel.  These they used to show how the designs where evolved and what some of the possibilities are.

Towards the end of the day I had an opportunity to demonstrate some work I have being doing on how other services, such as Google Book Search and screen reader technology can be added to the Prism interface.  Also on show for the first time was the Prism area of the Talis Developer Wiki, where the community of Prism users and developers will be able to share these experiences, code, and documentation for Prism extensions.

From feedback at the end of the day, it was clear that many had found it very useful.  A great start and I encourage all who are contemplating moving to the new version of Prism to sign up for and attend one of the other scheduled days.