On Monday 13 July we introduced an improvement to the processing of bibliographic updates to Talis Prism 3. This is a change that we have been planning and developing for some time. The updates from each library now have their own channel so, under normal load, they do not impact on the updates of others.

Early indications are that this has substantially reduced the time between making a change to a record in your local system and seeing it in Talis Prism 3. This is based on both the system logs and the experience of a number of customers who have reported a definite improvement.

Your local system regularly checks for bibliographic record changes which are then sent as updates to Talis Prism 3. Typically these changes will appear in Talis Prism 3 within minutes, although when there are large numbers of changes they are placed in a queue and will take longer to appear. The new parallel processing system means that high volumes of updates being processed for other customers are much less likely to impact the timeliness of your updates.

As part of wider ongoing work to improve the performance of Talis Prism 3, we have further plans for the development of the updating process. Currently, updates are sent by the local system, as described above. We will change it to a harvesting model where the local system prepares the updates and Prism centrally manages the collection of that data. This will give more control to the Prism update system, enabling it to be more efficient and to manage updates on a greater scale.