We’re pleased to announce that the next release of Prism is now available for preview.
This release includes:

• Format information fixes and improvements
• Improvements to the handling of main title information
• Improvements to the handling of production, publication, etc. information
• Security fixes

We’ve fixed the following issues concerning the generation of format information in Prism from MARC records:

• A new format label ‘Article’ will be applied to journal articles, where the record leader indicates language material and a monographic component part.
• A new format label ‘eAudiobook’ will be applied to records coded for non-music sound recording and appropriate information in 007 and 300 or 655. This will correct cases where they are currently being mis-labeled ‘Compact disc’.
• The label ‘Audio book’ is changed to ‘Audiobook’ and it will be applied to more cases.
• New format labels for game console formats or platforms such as ‘Playstation 3’, ‘Xbox 360’ and ‘Nintendo Wii’ will be assigned as appropriate, in addition to the existing carrier format such as ‘DVD-ROM’. These will be derived from records where the Leader is coded for Computer file and a game platform name is recognised in the Edition or System Details fields.
• The format label ‘Compact disc’ is changed to the more familiar ‘CD’.
•  CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs that are largely textual are now correctly labeled, rather than being treated as format ‘eBook’.
• Some records for DVDs that were being labeled as ‘Laserdisc’ are now assigned format ‘DVD’.
• The derivation of the format labels ‘Photograph’, ‘Poster’ and ‘Picture’ have been improved, based on information in fields 007 and 300.

Improvements to the handling of main title information
We’ve revised the processing to derive the main title that displays for an item. This now preserves all parallel titles, removes the ‘et al’ problem, deals with issues involving numbers  and tidies up punctuation and spacing.

Improvements to the handling of production, publication, etc. information

RDA cataloguing makes clearer distinctions within information about production, publication, manufacture and distribution. We’ve now reflected that in the Prism data model. Publication information will continue to display much as before, but any information about production, manufacture or distribution will be included in the Details section of the Item Detail page.

The data is also held in a more normalised and linked form to support further developments in future such as improved search by publisher or place of publication, and options to make connections through linked data.

Security fixes

After conducting a regular penetration test a few small issues were raised and these are also fixed in this release.