Over the past few weeks we have been working with a number of Prism customers to move their Prism bibliographic data from the Talis Platform onto the Capita Platform.

After a successful beta program with four customers we have now started to move across our remaining customers and to date 19 customers are now live on the Capita Platform including all of our Assist Managed Service customers.

For those of you who are yet to be migrated we thought it would be useful to outline the process so that you are fully aware of what is involved.

The migration is of the data only to the new platform and is not directly linked to the domain name transition, further details of which can be found here.

The platform migration involves a re-grab of the data from your catalogue. To minimise impact to your live service, we have redefined the process in recent weeks so that we only stop the delta updates for a couple of hours whilst the re-grab is performed. Once complete the deltas will be switched back on and any backlog will be cleared automatically.

Once the data has been re-grabbed it will be converted and loaded into your Sandbox environment and made available to you for testing. Once the testing has been completed the live tenancy will be pointed at this new data and a catch up delta grab will take place to ensure this data is fully up to date. This usually takes no longer than one hour.

On the migration process Tracey Temple from Northumbria University commented:

“The migration was smooth and painless, searching is quicker, as well as the wonderfully improved facet results, building from the whole result set is a major improvement, and it is handy being able to see the facet counts.”

John Daniel from Leeds Library and Information Services added:

“The new platform does seem faster returning results and seems to handle returning larger numbers of results better than before….. We also really like the Facet counts showing against each individual facet from a result set. The migration itself was a very smooth process with no down time that we noticed.”

We are currently scheduling the migration over to the new Capita platform and are on track to have all customers fully migrated by the end of July. If you are keen to be moved over the next month please let us know by raising a support case or emailing the team libraries-support@capita.co.uk and we will be in contact soon.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please contact us at libraries-support@capita.co.uk.