As my colleague, Imraz has reported in his most recent update, more libraries are starting to use Talis Prism 3 as either the main search interface or in parallel to the existing interface.  A few, like Haringey have taken the plunge in a big way, and simply replaced  the ‘old’ Prism 2.1 interface with the much more attractive Prism 3 look.

Towards the end of last week I was particularly struck by the latest library to launch their new interface, Leicestershire.  Apart from the clean look and feel to the design, attractive book jacket images, and the single search box (all of which are becoming standard on the newer  OPACs), I particularly liked the use of the additional information that has been included on the landing page.  Firstly, there is the tag cloud which directs users to a “Quick links section”.  These links give a highly visual way for users to explore some recommendations, and even a link to Library Thing, via a Book Suggestor. The second area that I thought was interesting was the provision of local library news via a panel on the front page of the catalogue.  This uses an RSS feed to give users a highly visible way of accessing the excellent Leicestershire Libraries Blog.

These additions to the interface are made possible using Juice extensions (for more information about Juice, please see here), and really enhance the look of the catalogue interface, and more importantly, provide users of the library services with the type of value added information that they expect from a website. It will be interesting to see what comments Leicestershire Libraries get from their users about Talis Prism 3.

The ability to run Talis Prism 3 in parallel with Talis Prism 2 means that we are seeing more and more customers choosing to soft launch Talis Prism 3 in a beta or parallel running phase. We have seen that usage of Talis Prism 3 is falling into one of three categories.

Beta – Where a customer has launched Prism 3 internally to staff and selected users to gather feedback which is then used to make improvements

Parallel – This is when Talis Prism 3 is run in parallel to Talis Prism 2 giving users the choice to trial the new catalogue. This is usually by placing a link on the existing Talis Prism 2 homepage to Talis Prism 3.

Live – This is when a customer has replaced Talis Prism 2 with Talis Prism 3 and this is their sole catalogue.

Below is a summary of customers who are using Talis Prism 3 in one of the above categories

Beta

University of Manchester

Parallel

University of Sunderland
Leicestershire Libraries
University of Cumbria
Thames Valley University

Live

University of Bolton
Bradford Libraries
Southwark Libraries
Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama
Haringey Libraries
University of Derby
Talnet – Gwynedd Council
Talnet – Anglesey Council
Talnet – Conwy Council
Talnet – Llandrillo College

If you have any queries about this or any other aspect of Talis Prism 3, please contact your Account Manager or email Alison Kershaw on alison.kershaw@talis.com

To keep up to date with the latest Talis Prism 3 Developments you can register for the webinar on Monday 8th March 2010.

Academic libraries click here to register.

Public libraries click here to register.

This webinar will focus again on discussing the latest Talis Prism 3 developments referring to the Talis Prism 3 Roadmap, while providing an opportunity for you to raise any specific questions that you may have.

In the meantime keep up with the latest Talis Prism 3 news and developments on the Talis Prism 3 website and blog.

If you were unable to attend one of our recent Prism 3 update webinars, then catch up on latest developments by watching the recording below or by downloading the video. The main topics covered were:

• Prism 3 Roadmap
• Review of the latest release
• Closer look at the Display of Notes, Semantic Web model and Google Analytics

We are likely to be holding another in early March, so keep an eye on the blog for the announcement.

We will also be discussing developments at the Talis Prism User Day on 18 March 2010. Register your place now.

[podcast format=”video”]http://talis-videos.s3.amazonaws.com/Prism_webinar_190110.mp4[/podcast]

For those who have started their Talis Prism 3 implementation, join us at the Talis offices for a free Talis Prism User Day on 18 March 2010. Share your experiences with other Prism 3 users, see the latest development roadmap and feed your thoughts into the future of our development plans. Register your free place at Prism events page.

The eagle-eyed amongst you spotted that we made some changes very early this year, but that we didn’t publish a release notice. So here’s me coming clean on our early January release.

We released a number of under-the-bonnet changes on 6 January, this was a maintenance release to do some internal improvements and also to trial some new functionality with one of our academic customers.

A few months back the academic libraries told us how important it would be for them to have the same View My Account sign-in links from their portal that they currently have in Prism 2. We blogged about Portal Single Sign-On after that webinar and committed to getting something in place for now. This release includes the necessary pieces in Prism 3 to allow single sign-on links in the portal to be re-configured for Prism 3. We’re testing that with one of our large academics right now and will be able to make that available to everyone soon. If you are an academic library who wants to go live with Prism 3 now that portal sign-on links are available, please let your account manager know.

Another important feature for several of you out there is the ability to configure the search sort ordering. This release includes the ability to configure the sort drop down according to your own needs. We’ve configured all of you with the original out-of-the-box settings for Prism 3, so nothing has changed in your tenancies and we have been testing a different set of options with one of our academic customers. At the moment this is only configurable by the development team, not via the admin interface, so we have limited capacity to make these changes right now. If you have an immediate need to alter your sort options then please log a support call for the change.

Under the bonnet we also made some improvements in the way we handle page rendering, this was to reduce load on our servers, allowing more customers to go live and keeping the costs of running the service down. This improvement has also made a small difference to page load times across Prism 3.

If you have any questions on this or other issues feel free to email me Alison.Kershaw@talis.com or your account manager. Or comment here, of course.

We have a question about the way we handle notes that we would like your help with – how notes display in Prism 3.

We’ve been looking at this because a few customers have asked for more of their notes to display on the item detail pages in Prism 3. At the moment only one note from the marc record is shown and it’s not predictable which one will be shown.

The reason notes don’t work well today is that the underlying data model for notes was designed for indexing and didn’t consider the needs of displaying notes properly. All notes from 500, 501, 502, 504, 505, 508, 511, 518, 520, 521, 533, 534, 536, 538, 545 and 550 are kept and indexed for search, unfortunately they are not kept in distinct properties and the order in which they were present in the marc record is not preserved.

In the Semantic Data Model work we have already designed new data structures for notes that will keep them distinct and maintain the ordering from the catalogue record – so longer term we will be addressing this issue much more cleanly.

What some of you have asked us to do in the meantime is to display all of the notes we have stored for indexing. This would display more of your valuable information to the user, helping them understand more about the item they’re looking at. On the downside, because of the limits of the data model, the order in which the notes are displayed would not be predictable and some notes such as the Summary, Contents and Performers notes may be repeated in the display.

We’ll be discussing this at the development webinar today and would very much like to hear your views on what is most preferable – more data, but with some repetition, or showing only one note as we do today. You can add a comment to this post, email terry.willan@talis.com, or bring your views to the development webinar.

To help you see what we mean we’ve put together some example screens showing how the notes would display. Click on each screenshot for a larger view of it.

• Catch-22 (with publication history, summary and indexes notes)
  
• Songs of Scotland (with contents and performers notes
  
• Language proof and logic (with contents, accompanying material, indexes and system requirements notes)
  

Having used the Google Analytics (GA) application in conjunction with Talis Prism 3 (and Engage) for some time, we asked two of our customers what they thought of the application and what information from GA was being collected and used on a regular basis.

The dashboard view is certainly something that featured highly in the feedback – particularly its ability to show trends across a variety of options, allowing easier monitoring of developments such as increased usage of ipod/iphone.   As Christine Smith, Collection Development Manager, University of Bolton said “The general dashboard information is used quite a bit to show trends – and always impresses senior managers.”

Other information regularly collected includes:

• Daily/hourly totals usage graphs
• Usage by browser/operating system, enabling better system support
• Top keyword searches which give detail on what people are looking for
• Monitoring the hits on “promoted” items

Below are three screenshots showing the different pieces of information that are readily accessible using Google Analytics.  Clicking on any of the screenshots will open up a larger image which will enable you to see the details of the report more easily.

This first screenshot shows a typical dashboard view, based on our demonstration tenancy, Broadminster,  giving a high level overview of items such as the number of  visits to the tenancy, the sources of the traffic and a map showing where the visitors are from.

This second screenshot delves deeper into the visitor data and shows the number of people visiting the site over the given time period, how many pages were viewed, and the average amount of time spent on the site.  This report also shows which browsers people have used to access the site and a list of the various connection speeds.

The third screenshot looks specifically at search terms and details information about the most popular search terms.

However, the reports are not limited to just these factors.  If the information is recorded, then it can be reported on.

In summary, using the feedback from Mary King, Applications Manager (Library Systems), Southwark Council  “To be honest if you have the time you can pull all sorts of really interesting, useful and quirky info from analytics, we love it here.  We have much better access to a much wider range of stats, presented in a range of user friendly formats.  If we had time and resources (I) am sure there is lots more we could be doing but for the moment it makes it much easier to track usage and identify trends.”

Talis Training is also currently working on a training session looking at using Google Analytics to monitor the usage of your Talis Prism 3 tenancy.  Further information about this will follow.

In the meantime, if you would like any further information or to discuss the implementation of Google Analytics within your tenancy, please contact your Account Manager or email training@talis.com

Several weeks ago we had a development update webinar where we explained the Semantic Data Model theme from the roadmap in more detail. We’d had conversations with several people one-to-one about this theme as questions were raised and the webinar was a great chance to discuss this important work more widely. I’d like to thank those of you who followed up with us after the webinar with support, feedback and valuable suggestions. For those who couldn’t make it, for those who wanted information to pass on to colleagues and for those who wanted a point of reference to refer back to, here it is.

As many of you know, Prism 3 doesn’t use MARC as its underlying data format. While MARC is a very useful and valuable model Prism 3 requires something much more flexible and extensible. Of course, you have a significant investment in your MARC data, years of cataloguing – keeping the human investment made in the cataloguing, while moving it to a technical form that provides more flexibility will let Prism 3 do more with the data you’ve invested in. The Semantic Data Model theme of work is about improving three main areas.

Firstly, we need more from the original MARC record for indexing and display. Secondly, Prism 3 has further search and browse features on the roadmap. Thirdly we want to provide a comprehensive Application Programming Interface, API.

What this means in Prism 3 is that we will be able to provide a much more browsable catalogue with pages for every author, for subjects, for each collection and location. This gives us the places to extend Prism and it will give your users the links to really explore what you have.

These pages will be linked, back and forth, providing a browsable interface not only for your users but also for search engines. Allowing search engines to crawl your catalogue, indexing it and making your catalogue much more visible in search results.

The API will allow you to get at your data in more ways and to re-use your data in other places. Fancy embedding search results in a Facebook app? Or tracking new stock in your RSS feed reader? The API will allow you to make use of your data in these kinds of ways. The format of the data will be in a variety of flavours, including XML and JSON, to support the way web developers work today.

The API will also allow richer extensions to be built for Prism 3 itself, allowing you, the community of users, to develop and share additional features using JavaScript frameworks like Juice. Your data will be easier to get at, enhance and re-use.

The data model we are building on is also extensible, meaning we can add to it as new requirements come to light. This will allow us to build more into the data model in future, things like FRBR style groupings. It is also the same style of linked data as is being used by the BBC and Library of Congress and being explored the British Library. This means that further down the road there is the opportunity to link books in your catalogue with BBC programmes that they relate to, or to historical information at the British Library or Library of Congress.

The Semantic Data Model work in Prism 3 isn’t inventing something entirely new though. It builds on work done over many years in MARC21, both bibliographic data and authority data, as well as standards such as Dublin Core, RDA, FRBR and RDF. And, looking further back, the card indexes of Charles Ami Cutter. The model will really allow the investment in cataloguing and catalogue data that you have made to shine in Prism 3, helping your users to find, and get at, what they need more easily.

So, the bulk of the work we’re doing is about going from a MARC record, which has simple names in it, to a data model that has rich relationships in it. That is where the Semantic Data Model fits in. So, it’s a data model for Prism 3, but where does the word ‘Semantic’ come from?

The technology behind what we’re doing comes from the next generation of the web, a web of data. This web is already being built and is an enhancement to the web today, not a replacement for it. This web of data, or Semantic Web, is already being supported by UK and US Government initiatives and by major media organisations such as the BBC and New York Times. The Semantic Data Model will allow Prism 3 not only to provide new and richer features for discovery, but also prepares the ground for libraries to participate in the web of data.

For those who attended the webinar and asked for the slides, they’re available here.

During December we saw 1,970,154 searches being carried out in Talis Prism 3. Although this figure is lower then November most universities are closed from mid December onwards, and public libraries also close for several days.

We look forward to seeing an increase in January when we are expecting more libraries to launch Talis Prism 3.

If you have any queries about this or any other aspect of Talis Prism 3, please contact your Account Manager or email Alison Kershaw on alison.kershaw@talis.com