Prism 3 Release Preview – 2 September 2010
We’ve just released the latest version of Talis Prism 3 for everyone to preview; this release contains some essential precursors for introducing the Semantic Data Model, as well as several other under-the-bonnet tweaks.
The biggest change in this release is a new session tracking system. By tweaking how we handle “my account” sessions, we’ve been able make some changes which will allow us to further improve performance in Prism 3 going forward.
We’ve also enabled Talis Aspire integration, allowing those of you with our next-generation resource list management system to flag what lists an item appears on. If your institution uses Talis Aspire and you would like us to enable this integration, please raise a support request and we will make the necessary configuration changes.
For those of you undertaking your own styling, we’ve introduced a new theme fragment for placing all JavaScript includes; this allows us to control when they are sent to the browser, optimising the performance of your Prism 3 tenancy.
Finally, this version contains the first release of the Semantic Data Model. This will be trialled with several beta customers before being made more widely available. The work released today includes the new “Format” and “Content” facets, as well as display of Alternate Graphic Representation (MARC21 field 880) on item pages. Here’s a sneak preview of this new feature:
Main record representation
Alternate graphic representation shown after clicking on the "Chinese" tab.
As you can see, this release contains quite a lot of “under-the-bonnet” work so we’d really appreciate it if you can all cast an eye over your tenancies. To view the release preview, simply place /demo/ after the prism.talis.com part of your url, e.g. http://prism.talis.com/demo/leicestershire/.
If you have any questions on this, or other issues, please feel free to email me (Phil.John@talis.com) or your account manager (or comment here, of course).
September 6th, 2010 at 4:06 pm
Sorry to ask this when you’re just releasing the results of your work on formats, but – have you considered a word other than “book” for text materials which aren’t journals? An example here: http://prism.talis.com/cityoflondon/items/1358916 which is a record for a journal article. We have lots of these and they emphatically are not books. Neither are broadsides (e.g. http://prism.talis.com/cityoflondon/items/1880080) or even, in some people’s minds, pamphlets. I know that “book” is a lot more easily understood than “text” and I admit I can’t think of a neat alternative…
September 8th, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Hi Heather,
Could you please send me the MARC21 record for that item and I’ll have a look what I can glean from it?
Kind regards,
Phil John
Prism 3 Technical Lead
September 8th, 2010 at 3:58 pm
I expect you’re going to say it’s the fault of my coding…! Can’t get the examples to stick here so I’ll email them.
September 9th, 2010 at 4:25 pm
Hi Heather,
Looking at the records, there isn’t anything there that we can really say definitively “isn’t” a book (and there a probably lots of book records like this which it would be incorrect to *not* label as book).
This isn’t anything with your coding, but a deficiency in MARC 21, we’ll have a look and see if there’s any field that could be used to flag these records up, but that would involve re-cataloguing records. The only one that springs to mind currently is 773 $7.
Kind regards,
Phil John
Prism 3 Technical Lead.
September 10th, 2010 at 10:58 am
Thanks. Recataloguing is out of the question, I think – first of all, I don’t know how we’d identify all the records that need editing and, second, there are going to be too many of them. I wonder if other libraries are going to have the same problem?