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
• Roadmap
• General Update
  • Next release:
  • Admin Console
  • Talis Library Ideas
  • SDM
  • Roadmap next steps
    • 20% Dev time for ideas forum ideas
    • Planning for “augmented discovery”
    • Improvements to advanced search
    • Questions

The next webinar will be on Monday 23rd August, details will be posted on the Talis Prism blog shortly.

[podcast format=”video”]http://talis-videos.s3.amazonaws.com/prism_webinar_120710.mp4[/podcast]

Following on from Terry’s post about the way that Highland libraries have embedded the Prism search box into their Facebook page, I was interested to see how Leeds Libaries are taking an opposite view – and using their Prism interface to surface the feed from their Facebook site.

As many libraries seek to attract new users and engage with their customers, it’s becoming increasingly important to be able to create not only a suitably branded web presence for the library catalogue, but also one that offers multiple channels to ‘speak’ to users. Currently Leeds Libraries  are parallel running their ‘old’ catalogue with the new interface, which is allowing them to fully ‘road test’ the functionality and get feedback from users as to what they want to see. 

The integration of the Facebook feed on the front page, allows for a seamless ‘news’ feature to appear on their catalogue home page, the recent information covers such diverse topics as the death of the writer Beryl Bainbridge to encouraging people to still celebrate the World Cup. This is all contained within a well designed page, making the information easy for users of the catalogue to consume.  The flexibility of the interface aids the useability of the interface, and keeps it fresh and entertaining.

Have a look here to see what you think.

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.

This release enables us to widen availability of the Admin Console, please contact support and raise a service request if you would like us to set up credentials for you.

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 customers to preview; as well as a small under the hood change to improve “My Account” page rendering times, this version contains a few tweaks to the search system:

• Facets now persist when changing sort order
• Exact searches no longer widen terms to include stemmed versions
• New “series:” index name enabled
• Other small tweaks to improve the relevance of certain searches

Finally, we’ve included a method for customers who are currently using the Admin Console to force through changes immediately; this will allow us to widen availability to all customers with Prism 3.

You can access the preview by putting demo/ directly after the prism.talis.com address, for example http://prism.talis.com/demo/leicestershire/.

If you have any questions on this, or other issues, feel free to email me phil.john@talis.com or your account manager (or comment here, of course).

An ongoing development theme, running in tandem with our other efforts, is a continual focus on improving performance in Prism 3. To validate this work, we have monitoring set up for several tenancies.

I’ve extracted logs from two tenancies and put together charts showing the marked improvement in response times over the last 12 months. The three lines on the chart show the average response time in seconds for the catalogue landing page (home), a search against the catalogue (search) and displaying an item/work (item):

Public tenancy (click to enlarge)

Academic tenancy (click to enlarge)

It’s great to see that all three are loading in under half a second, making the experience for your end users much snappier. This isn’t to say that our work in this area is done – there are more tweaks we are planning to put in place in Prism 3, and the underlying platform it runs upon. Thanks to the “Software as a Service” model used for Prism 3, we can roll out these improvements as soon as they are ready.

The application is just part of the picture though; if you’ve created your own theming/styling for Prism 3, ensuring this is suitably optimised will also improve the performance for your end users. Much of the perceived slowness in a website is actually waiting for items to render once they’ve been downloaded, and you can do a lot to improve this. Properly optimising a design is a lengthy topic, which is covered in far more detail elsewhere (e.g. the Yahoo Performance Rules), but here are some quick tips:

• Make sure you optimise images and choose the right formats. Use a program like Adobe Fireworks to compress images; if you have a photo on your catalogue home, you can usually compress it by about 85% with no loss of detail. For logos, avoid JPEGs, use PNG and set it to the exact colour-palette to keep the filesize down
• If you use a series of backgrounds or icons, consider using CSS Sprites to combine them into one image file. This will reduce the overall number of requests for a page and speed up its delivery
• Put Javascript as close to the bottom of the page as possible (in Prism 3 this means the end of your footer fragment). Since Javascript is interpreted by the browser as soon as it loads, large scripts in the head of a document can cause a delay before a page renders properly
• Combine scripts into one file; as with images, loading lots of small pieces has more overhead than one larger file
• Minify CSS and Javascript, tools like the YUI Compressor can cut the filesize and hence the time taken to download these elements
• Make sure you remove styles only used in development, or which use hooks deprecated from the Prism 3 interface (such as the old availability layout)

If you’d like to discuss this, or any other issue, please either leave a comment here, or email Phil.John@talis.com.

To keep up to date with the latest Talis Prism 3 Developments you can register for the free webinar on Monday 12th July 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:

• Prism 3 Roadmap
• General Update
  • Next Release
  • Tweaks to search
  • Admin console cache clear
• Admin Console Update
• Ideas.talis.com overview and demo
• Semantic Data Model Update
  • Current theme of work : Format
  • Next Steps
• Flagging Aspire reading lists
• Developer documentation wiki
• Google Analytics Update
• Q&A session

The next webinar will be on Monday 12^th July, details will be posted on the Talis Prism blog shortly.

[podcast format=”video”]http://talis-videos.s3.amazonaws.com/prism_webinar_260510.mp4[/podcast]

Highland Libraries has a vibrant Facebook page and we were delighted to see that it now includes a search box to search their Talis Prism 3 catalogue. Highland Libraries has been offering Prism 3 alongside their Prism 2.1 catalogue since early March.

Embedding the Prism search box in any site is simply

a matter of pasting some code into the site page. You can find all you need in a Developer Documentation topic in the Prism Forum.

We’d love to hear from other libraries who have done this or who have extended their Talis Prism 3 catalogue in other ways.

At the Talis Prism 3 User Day back in March, we announced we’d be implementing a system for you to suggest new ideas and features; I am pleased to announce that Talis Library Ideas has now been launched. We’ve decided to use the same system as Talis Aspire, our Resource List Management System, so accounts can be shared between them.

Talis Library Ideas is the voice of the customer group. It allows you to raise new ideas for Prism and for the community to develop a shared understanding of what that idea involves, the goals it meets for your end users and to set its priority through the voting system.

That is not to say we will action all ideas. There are many competing priorities, particularly with the roadmap themes. It may be the idea will prompt a theme of its own, or contribute to a theme we’re already considering. However it ensures the idea is visible.

Each of you have a pool of ten votes to promote ideas, and up to three can be used on a single idea to give a personal weighting (somewhat important, important or very important). When ideas are either accepted or declined, votes are returned, allowing you to redistribute them.

To signup for an account please visit http://ideas.talis.com and click on the “Signup” link at the top of the page. So that it’s fair, we will approve one account from each instituition.  I’ll provide an overview of Talis Library Ideas during the Prism 3 Webinar next week, but if anyone has any questions in the interim you can either email me at Phil.John@talis.com, or comment here.

It’s been 3 months since my last update and a lot has been happening within the Talis Prism 3 world during that time. We have seen a major new release which included Improvements in display of availability information, Admin Console beta release, New Stock/Prepared Searches beta release and the option for libraries to use their own hostname for Prism 3.

We have also seen a further 10 libraries launch Prism 3 to run in parallel to Prism 2 or as their sole catalogue, taking the total number of libraries running Prism 3 to 27.

Having implemented Google Analytics on all live Prism 3 tenancies at the end of March I thought I would share some of the statistics around Talis Prism 3 that are available to us.

During April we saw 104,961 visits to Prism 3 catalogues. A total of 668,306 pages were viewed and the most accessed catalogue was the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama http://prism.talis.com/rsamd which had around 21000 visits. We also saw that across all catalogues Talis Prism 3 was accessed from a total of 86 different countries.

Google Analytics provides detailed statistics on a per customer basis which you can access by logging into your individual Google Accounts.

If you would like guidance in understanding and interpreting Google Analytics at your library or would like it installed on your catalogue please contact Imraz.Mohammed@talis.com

You can keep up with the latest Talis Prism 3 news and developments on the Talis Prism 3 website and blog. The next development update webinar will be held on Monday 24th May, details can be found here.