Prism Release Preview – 25 July 2012
I’m pleased to announce that a new version of Prism is available for you to preview.
Reserve button displays only when the item is reservable
This has been the top requirement in Prism Ideas. It has now been implemented in a combination of the Local Data Services and Prism.
When there are no reservable copies a different button displays with configurable text – the default is ‘Not Reservable’. When clicked, an information 
box pops up with an explanation (this is also configurable text).
When the user is not signed in, this happens for those items where no copies are reservable by anyone, such as electronic resources and reference material. When the user is signed in the system applies further rules to identify cases where there are no reservable copies for the current borrower type, or the specific borrower has a condition where reservation is denied, such as having reached their reservation limit, or being blocked.
This feature requires an upgrade to the latest version of the Local Data Services (LDS) which is currently being rolled out, prioritised by need and request. To register for your LDS upgrade, please open a support case or contact your account manager.
Next and Previous buttons
These allow bro
wsing back and forth in results quickly at the item detail level. Preserving the context is crucial for this feature and it does that even when the URL for an item detail page is saved and used again later.
Renewal workflow
The re-designed process for renewing loans aims to make it quicker, more informative and easier to see the outcomes. It all happens in the loans page quickly without refreshing the page, temporarily changing the Renew button and displaying a message pinned to the top of the screen to give the outcome for each item. A single exception message is displayed even when the system identifies multiple exceptions, selected from a preference order, so that the user is not overloaded with information.
Notes data
This has been completely re-modelled. Notes data is no longer duplicated and data order is preserved from repeats of the same MARC field. Contents notes are structured and displayed in a more readable way, including a link to view the content in a lightbox pop-up. All standard MARC notes (5XX fields) that are relevant to public display are included. BBFC film classifications are displayed as the appropriate symbol.
Any change to the data model requires the data to be re-processed before the changes are manifested in Prism. The changes for notes data will be seen for new and edited records, and across the catalogue after a full data (re-)upload. Furthermore, the changes for processing updates do not take effect until the release goes live – it will affect updates after that. Therefore you will not be able to see the new notes display in the preview.
Item level notes
Descriptive and General notes from item (i.e.copy) records in your local system are now 
displayed after the Status in the availability area. The column heading ‘Notes’ only displays when there is a note. This did not require a change to the LDS, so all your Descriptive and General item notes will display now.
Facebook integration
Technically, we have embedded Facebook Open Graph protocol meta tags in Prism, which means that when you implement the Facebook ‘Like’ extension the information from Prism is fully integrated in Facebook, including images.
Feedback spam honeypot
This is intended to trap and discard spam messages generated by automated agents in the Prism feedback form, which have become a nuisance. They tend to fill in every field on the form, so we’ve added a field that’s hidden in the Prism interface but visible to software agents; when a message includes data in that field Prism discards the message.
Performance tweaks
With our approach to continual improvements to the performance of Prism we have made various upgrades to the web server software, delivering incremental performance improvements that add to the responsive feel of Prism and better fit it for future development. We have also been able to adjust the response when no cover image is found so that your browser is more efficient in its use of the Prism servers.
Can’t see the changes?
In a few tenancies some of the changes, such as the Next/Previous buttons, are not displaying. We are working on an update to the release to address this. Meanwhile it can be fixed locally by enabling HTML5 and the Mobile Prism theme. This is done in the Layout Modules area for the relevant tenancy in the Admin Console. It is strongly recommended that you do this in your sandbox tenancy first. Be sure to click ‘Update’ to save the changes and then reset the cache for the tenancy by submitting the URL composed of the base URL followed by /resettenantcache.
Next steps
After a week for you to preview these features, they will be released to the live service during next week. Do make the most of the preview time to try them on your tenancy, and we’d love to hear your feedback. You will also want to ensure that there are no problems with your local styling – there are no changes that should affect styling or extensions in tenancies that adhere to the style guidelines.
As usual, you can preview this release by inserting ‘/demo/’ after the prism.talis.com part of your URL and before the name of your tenancy, e.g. http://prism.talis.com/demo/mytenancy/. If you have your own host name, to see the preview you must use prism.talis.com/ instead. The preview enables you to search your live data and access your live Local Data Services (e.g. for availability, renewals and reservations) using the new version of Prism. You can also use it with your sandbox tenancy.
If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch. You can comment here on the blog, on the Prism forum and Prism Ideas or contact your account manager or the Prism team directly.
July 25th, 2012 at 12:11 pm
I’ve just upgraded a QMW record and checked it in our sandbox. The 505 field is still duplicated (as “Notes” and then “Contents”).
Very pleased to see the Next & Previous buttons at last!
Kate Bunting
University of Derby
July 25th, 2012 at 1:14 pm
Hi Kate, Could you send me the bibID of that record?
Thanks.
July 25th, 2012 at 3:30 pm
I apologise for being misleading. The Notes changes will not be seen during the preview. The part of the software that does the update processing will not take effect until the release goes live, so records edited before that will still be processed into the current model. I’ve edited the blog post to clarify this.
July 26th, 2012 at 10:31 am
Just been checking the new elements in the Fife demo version, Next and previous working well, like this. Renewals changes also working fine, it will be interesting to get the reaction from the public when it goes live, like the colour change to the buttons to indicate which renewals have been successful. I await ability to view the changes to the 5XX display with interest – it certainly sounds good. We will need to LDS upgrade to see the other features (request has being placed). We are not very expert with Juice extensions so may take a while before we can introduce this element! All in All looking pretty good.
July 26th, 2012 at 4:11 pm
We like the new renewals workflow and we’re sure the public will too – really good news. However, when I tried to renew a reserved item I got the wrong message “This loan has already been renewed”.
Next & Previous buttons are most welcome too.
The “Not reservable” button will be really helpful, but in the meantime the functionality’s there and not allowing item/borrower reserves as appropriate.
These are all things that will help the customers and which they’ve been asking for.
July 27th, 2012 at 8:27 am
Thanks for the feedback.
Regarding the wrong message when renewing a reserved item – we are currently investigating the renewal exception messages and will be releasing some changes soon.
July 27th, 2012 at 1:47 pm
We are appreciative of these changes too! For feedback, I can’t see the Not reservable changes and I thought we had the newest version of LDS. Perhaps I am mistaken?
I very much like the colour change for renewals but the Renewal failed button gets cut off – it says Renewal Fa. But it’s fine on the mobile version. Is that something to do with our tenancy set-up? The buttons time out after one minute too, I wonder if others think that is long enough?
July 31st, 2012 at 2:03 pm
Hi Claire, The rollout of the new LDS, which you need for the reservability change, has only just begun. You need to register your request for it by opening a support case.
We’re investigating the ‘Renewal failed’ truncation issue; there may be a global fix for it.
The timeout of the outcome buttons and messages can be changed. It’ll be interesting to hear comments on how long it should be.
July 27th, 2012 at 2:54 pm
Thanks from us as well for all this – lots of things my colleagues have been giving me grief over are now resolved. Hurrah!
August 1st, 2012 at 10:32 am
The Prism release on preview has been revised to address issues such as:
– Next/Previous buttons not appearing in some catalogues
– Individual Renewal buttons changing when Renew All gets some failures
– ‘Renewal failed’ message truncation on button
– Priority of renewal failure messages
Furthermore, a change to the Admin Console has been released to the live service: in the Community Features area you can now enable Open Graph meta data to support the Facebook ‘Like’ feature and some search engines, and you can optionally set your Facebook app id to override the system default.
The preview version of Prism will be released to the live service this afternoon.
August 1st, 2012 at 1:24 pm
Thanks Terry I thought we’d had a new version of LDS last December but this is obviously another one!
August 1st, 2012 at 1:48 pm
Just been checking the live version and we seem to have a couple of problems in Fife the next and previous buttons, although there, are not displaying correctly – other than that they work!
The changes to the 5XX’s – there seems to be no change to this – did this rely on the LDS upgrade?
Renewal buttons working fine – Getting the messages and the Renewed! and Failed on the buttons – Great.
August 1st, 2012 at 2:31 pm
Hi there,
I should probably know this but how do you check that we are actually on the latest version of the LDS?
August 1st, 2012 at 3:18 pm
Sorry Scott, you cannot see your LDS version at the moment. We’re working on a development where you will be able to see it and to manage LDS updates in the Admin COnsole.
The new version of the LDS (1.3) has only been available for a couple of weeks and it has to be installed manually by arrangement with you. Most libraries have not got it yet. We ask you to register your interest so that we can prioritise the deployment.
Notes data – the changes will only be seen when you edit records or when you have a full catalogue refresh. The records have to go through the amended update process to populate the new data elements in the Prism data model.
Aline – which browser are you using? Your Next/Previous buttons look fine in IE8, Firefox and Chrome.
August 1st, 2012 at 4:06 pm
Thanks Terry,
I knew there was something about the 5XX’s I was missing – that makes sense. I use IE8 and to be fair the buttons are now looking fine – must have been a blip at our end – thank you for the help!
September 11th, 2012 at 1:39 pm
We now have the new LDS in our test server. I note that the explanation given for items being non-reservable is very general in nature. Presumably this is because the text in the box is the same whether it’s a reference book or an e-book?
October 9th, 2012 at 8:59 am
Kate, Yes it’s a generic message at the moment, when you’re not signed in. The reservations logic is complex and it is difficult to provide a correct specific message when not all the information is available (i.e. the borrower is not known). However, we are considering the possibility of doing so for the cases where an item is not reservable due to copies being available on the shelf.