It’s been a few months since my last update and a lot has been happening within the Talis Prism 3 world during that time. We have seen several releases of Prism 3 as part of the work we are doing on the Semantic Data Model, as well as the launch of Talis Library Ideas and the rollout of the Admin Console for Prism 3. We also made available the option to customers to run Prism 3 on their own URL.

I have been busy working with many of our customers during the past three months helping them to launch Prism 3, which has resulted in a number of customers launching Prism 3 either in parallel to Prism 2 or as their sole new catalogue.

The recent launches of Prism 3 has resulted in over 30 customers who are now running Prism 3 as a live catalogue. These include Worcestershire Libraries (left) who have implemented the Google Translate service on their catalogue, East Renfrewshire Council who have used JUICE to add a Library Location extension on the item details page and University of Roehampton (below) who have launched at the start of the new term. Earlier this week we saw Cornwall Council launch their catalogue taking the total number of live instances of Prism 3 to 32.

We have also seen the University of Manchester and University of Sunderland launch Prism 3 with their own hostname.

With over 30 customers running Prism 3, we are now seeing some very interesting statistical information in Google Analytics. We have been able to aggregate this data in order to monitor areas such as performance and searching. For example in the past 7 days we have see over 330k visits to Prism 3 from 137 countries which resulted in over 1.2 million page views.

If you have any queries about this or any other aspect of Talis Prism 3, please contact your Account Manager or email Imraz.Mohammed@talis.com

To keep up to date with the latest Talis Prism 3 Developments you can register for the free webinar on Monday 8th November 2010 at 12:30 for Public Libraries and 14:00 for Academic Libraries

Public libraries click here to register.

Academic 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. We have changed the recording method for this webinar to improve sound quality.

The main topics covered were:

• Introductions
• Roadmap
• General Update
  • Release
  • Semantic Data Model
• Roadmap next steps
  • View Loan History
  • Choice of Jacket image supplier
  • Linked Data API
• Google Analytics stats
• Questions

[podcast format=”video”]http://talis-videos.s3.amazonaws.com/prism_webinar_041010.mp4[/podcast]

Earlier today we experienced an outage of roughly 1.5 hours on Talis Prism 3. We are very sorry for the inconvenience caused and wanted to give you a little technical background into what went wrong, and what we will be doing going forward to prevent this happening again.

This morning, at around 11:28, the Talis Platform Team observed an increase in the number of requests being sent to our backend data storage platform. We started investigating the reason for this immediately.

Whilst carrying out this investigation, at around 12:07, we started to see instability in Talis Prism 3; by 12:25 it was mostly unreachable, with a limited number of requests processing successfully.

Just after this, we identified that the outage was due to a 3^rd party caching system, which saves configuration values for each tenancy for subsequent requests, failing. Further investigation highlighted a bug that could cause failure under high load. We have just had some large customers launch Talis Prism 3 which pushed this system over a limit it was unable to handle. This load was expected, and planned for, however we were unaware of the existence of this bug.

Once we identified the culprit we put a configuration change in place to make Talis Prism 3 use a different caching system. This was completed at 13:27 and deployed to one of the live servers for testing.

We turned off all access to Talis Prism 3 at 13:35 to allow the backend data platform to recover and for us to evaluate if the new caching system was working as intended. Once we were confident that it was working and could handle the load, we preloaded all tenancies and turned Talis Prism 3 back on. All services resumed by 13:55.

Talis Prism 3 is designed to be able to use different caching systems and once this was proved to be the cause of the outage, switching over to a new one was very quick to implement. We have been planning to deprecate the current system and are in the final stages of testing a more robust replacement. Talis Prism 3 already sees very rigorous testing, both automated and manual, however, we have identified several places where we can put in extra load tests to simulate the traffic we saw today. We will be making the implementation of this our top priority.

We’re pleased to announce that the recent Prism 3 release preview has been released to the live Prism 3 environment. For further details on what has changed, please refer to the release preview blog post.

We’ve released this a little earlier than we normally would to ensure that certain features were out in time for our academic customers entering the start of a new semester.

Keep up with the latest Talis Prism 3 news and developments on the Talis Prism 3 website and blog.

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).

To keep up to date with the latest Talis Prism 3 Developments you can register for the free webinar on Monday 4th October 2010 at 12:30 for Public Libraries and 14:00 for Academic Libraries

Public libraries click here to register.

Academic 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:

• Introductions

• General Update
  • Admin Console
  • Talis Library Ideas
  • Coming in the next release
  • Update on Semantic Data Model

• Roadmap/next steps –
  • Improvements in My Account efficiency
  • 20% Dev time for ideas forum ideas
  • Improvements to advanced search

• Questions

The next webinar will be on 4^th October, details will be posted on the Talis Prism blog shortly.

[podcast format=”video”]http://talis-videos.s3.amazonaws.com/prism_webinar_230810.mp4[/podcast]

Talis Library Ideas enables customers to openly contribute and track ideas on Talis product development, to shape them collaboratively and to indicate their importance.

This 45 minute webinar will cover the purpose and principles of Talis Library Ideas; how to approach the submission of ideas; using your votes; a demonstration of how to use the system; and how ideas feed into the development of Talis products. The main product focus will be Talis Prism 3, as the first product with a forum in Talis Library Ideas.

A repeat of this free webinar has been scheduled to give you a choice of dates.

Date:     Wednesday 1st September 2010
Time:     11:00 – 11:45
Register here for your free place

Date:     Thursday 2nd September 2010
Time:     14:00 – 14:45
Register here for your free place

To keep up to date with the latest Talis Prism 3 Developments you can register for the free webinar on Monday 23rd August 2010 at 12:30 for Public Libraries and 14:00 for Academic Libraries

Public libraries click here to register.

Academic 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.