Prism Release Preview 7th February 2014
We’re pleased to announce that the next release of Prism is now available for preview, with associated features in a new release of the Admin Console.
This release includes:
- Autocomplete search suggestions
- Date range widget for Published Year facet
- Reviews
- Indicate reserved loans
- Web pages in search results
- Upload images for items without standard numbers
- Improvements to Spelling Suggestions (Did you mean …)
- Other inclusions
Autocomplete
As you enter text into the search box, Prism provides a list of suggested searches based on the information that is being entered. This reduces the amount of typing required and will return results more quickly. Prism suggests titles, 
authors, subjects, nature of contents and genres, with the data coming directly from your catalogue content. On selecting a suggestion the search is submitted.
The autocomplete option is available to view in your sandbox tenancy at demo.capitadiscovery.co.uk/{your catalogue name}-sandbox. On go live we will enable this feature across the customer base over a period of one month. If you would like to be one of the first customers to have this feature enabled in your catalogue please open a support case.
Date range widget for Published Year facet
The Year Published facet now gives a visual representation of the spread of 
publication dates in your results together with a slider tool allowing you to easily select a date range. In the mobile interface this is replaced by drop-down lists of ‘From’ and ‘To’ years.
Reviews
Users can now review items in the catalogue, which can be moderated by library staff. This feature is turned off by default, but can be easily enabled in the Admin Console. Under the Community Features section there is an ‘Enable reviews’ check box. Your existing moderation settings will apply to reviews.
There is a new User Content Moderation (Reviews) section in the Admin Console, following the same pattern as the moderation sections for Lists and Tags.
The Community Contributions panel in the Item Detail page lists up to three recent reviews, together with a link to browse all reviews available. In this area, you can add or edit your own review and set or amend your individual rating (if ratings are enabled in the catalogue). You also have the ability to log in to report a review as inappropriate.
System text is configurable.
Indicate reserved loans
In the list of loans, within the My Account area, Prism now displays an indicator when the item is reserved by another user. Should a user click on th
is indicator, an information message is displayed.
The text of this message is configurable.
Web pages in search results
You are now able to add your own URL content to Prism, and have these pages 
highlighted to a borrower when searching for matching keywords. This could be used to enable users to find the Library Opening Hours page or the Library Charges page by searching in Prism.
The Admin Console has a new section, ‘Pages’, allowing you to specify page URLs and associate query terms with them. You can also give them a title and description: the title provides the link text in the search result, and the description displays below it. During the preview period this feature will be enabled within your Prism sandbox. Once Prism has been released to the live service you will be able to enable this feature in your Prism catalogue through the Admin Console.
Upload images for items without standard numbers
A new section in the Admin Console allows you to upload images to display in Prism. This is for items that don’t currently have an image and where the record does not have any standard identifiers such as ISBN, ISSN or EAN. This will be useful for older material and for equipment such as cameras and laptops.
To upload an image you need to specify the item unique identifier, then browse and select the image from your computer file system. Prism automatically re-sizes the image to each of the three widths used in Prism, preserving the aspect ratio. Please bear in mind that image file size will affect upload time. It is advisable to ensure your image height is between 1 and 2 times the width for an effective display in Prism. Please ensure that you have the right to use any image that you upload.
Improvements to Spelling Suggestions (Did you mean …)
In response to feedback the recent spelling suggestions feature has been refined to give better suggestions and eliminate the less useful ones.
Other inclusions
- Display Current Frequency. This displays some helpful extra data in the item detail page for serials, with the default label ‘Current frequency’. The information comes from field 310 in the MARC record.
- Paging on tag pages. Paging is now included on results for a tag, so that all items with that tag can now be viewed.
- Error when signed in user submits feedback – fixed. A user who has signed in to Prism can submit feedback without getting an error.
Making the most of your preview
This release is now available for you to preview. Please do make the most of this opportunity to gain familiarity with the new features and ensure that your tenancy still behaves as expected.
If you identify any issues with your styling please raise a Support case.
As with every release, please also ensure that your extensions continue to work correctly.
To preview this release, please precede your tenancy URL with ‘demo.’, like this: demo.capitadiscovery.co.uk/{your tenancy name}. If you have your own host name, you’ll need to use demo.capitadiscovery.co.uk instead.
The preview will run for two weeks before release to the live service.
Release to the live service
The release to the live service will be on Monday 24th February 2014.
Comments and contact
If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch. You can comment here on the Prism blog, on the Prism forum and Prism Ideas or contact your Account Manager or the Prism team directly.
February 7th, 2014 at 3:54 pm
I’m so pleased to see the Reviews feature arrive. However looking at our demo site there is no ‘Log in to add review’ button or ‘Log in to report inappropriate’.
February 20th, 2014 at 11:46 am
Hi Rona, I see you don’t have ‘Enable Reviews’ checked (Admin Console > Community Features) in either your main catalogue or your sandbox at the moment.
When reviews are enabled, the ‘Log in to report as inappropriate’ link appears in the separate page of reviews for an item. That page also includes a ‘Write your own review’ link. We’re working on an update to include a ‘Log in to add a review’ link in the Community Contributions panel on the Item Detail page.
February 13th, 2014 at 10:39 am
Autocomplete
This is actually quite dreadful. When typing in something I know exists like Pandaemonium it doesn’t give me a result at all. Afetr I’ve hit enter and seen the books it ask me if I meant Pandemonium.
Likewise if you type Harry Potter it doesn’t return anything for Harry Potter. Same for Hairy Bikers although it made is laugh when we did a reverse name search and got results using Bikers Hairy…… Same for Potter Harry
Also searching for glasnost or perestroika – absolutely nothing as you type the search words but there are results to be seen.
March 4th, 2014 at 12:33 pm
Hi Lesley,
In the update on 24th February we included some improvements to autocomplete. The title ‘Pandaemonium’ is now offered when you type ‘pandae’. The ‘Did you mean’ spelling suggestion for ‘Pandemonium’ is surely reasonable since it retrieves considerably more results than the original query.
Autocomplete now offers Harry Potter titles when you type ‘harry pot’, and Hairy Bikers titles when you type ‘hairy bi’. Similarly, ‘glasn’ or ‘peres’ now get glasnost and perestroika suggestions.
Whilst it often provides helpful suggestions, we recognise that there is scope for further improvement and we’ll continue to seek ways to achieve that.
February 13th, 2014 at 10:40 am
Date range widget for Published Year facet
Once you have narrowed the years you cannot then extend it should you need to without completely coming out and back to the main page again.
March 4th, 2014 at 12:43 pm
Hi Lesley, Regarding the date range widget, it is still a facet and so the selected value appears in the breadcrumb trail at the top of the page, as before. You can remove the date range selection there.
February 27th, 2014 at 4:23 pm
Date-range slider
We have wanted the ability to search on a date range for a long time so it’s great to see it. However, it has revealed a number of spurious date ranges which will confuse our users: things would be much better if you took the date just from the 260 field. Would this be possible for us at least?
March 4th, 2014 at 1:41 pm
Hi Shelagh, I assume the spurious date ranges are due to incorrect data, such as 991 instead of 1991. The Prism data model has a single data element for year published, taking data from MARC fields 008/07-14, 046, 260, 264. It is not feasible to vary this by library. Those spurious dates may look odd on the range selector but its function is not impeded by them. You could take it as an opportunity to clean up the data, as and when. You can use the ‘publishedyear’ search qualifier to find all records with a particular date (as documented in the Prism Forum under Expert Search Options), for example: publishedyear:991.