We’re pleased to announce an enhancement related to eJournals/ePress titles provided by Bolinda.

eJournal (or ePress) titles provided by Bolinda can now be viewed and borrowed

Following Bolinda’s recent move to begin providing these new records, we have now implemented a change to a background process in Prism that enables them to be loaded and appear in the appropriate results sets. If you take this type of material from Bolinda, it will start to appear in Prism from now on.

Within Prism, the borrower can display the full record and then click on the Login to Request button to access the journal through BorrowBox, in the same way as eBooks and eAudiobooks. eJournal loans will also appear in My account under the eContent tab.

Changes to the admin console

We recently released the following changes to the Admin console:

• Further changes in preparation for Ad hoc notifications in Soprano
• Notification rules – all parameter values are now retained
• Notification rules – the date picker and scheduling 

Further changes in preparation for Ad hoc notifications in Soprano

Additional changes have been made to the Admin console in preparation for configuring Ad hoc notifications for ILL requests. These changes won’t impact anything already configured and can be ignored when using the Admin console while this work continues. When the changes to the Soprano interface are ready, they will be released in the usual way and we will explain how to set up and use the new feature.

Notification rules – all parameter values are now retained

Now when a rule is created or edited and several values need to be selected for a parameter, they can be chosen either one at a time or several at a time. The values already present when the Create or Update button is clicked are retained. If you find the parameter values still go missing, go into a browser to edit or create a rule and use CTRL SHIFT R to refresh the cache. Once the cache has been cleared it will work correctly.

Notification rules – the date picker and scheduling 

In the Scheduling section of a notification rule, the date picker can now be used to pick a date. The system shows the selected date and  won’t refresh the screen back to the tenancy list.

Release process has already been completed

Both sets of changes have already been implemented. If you take eJournals/ePress items from Bolinda then these will start to appear in search results from now on. The Admin console has also already been updated with the changes.

Comments and contact

Please get in touch if you have any comments, questions or suggestions. You can comment here on the Prism blog, or contact our Support team directly. To suggest and discuss additional features please contact Heather Brown (csm@librarymanagementcloud.com).

We’re pleased to announce that the version of Prism that has been in preview recently has now been released to the live service.

The details are described in this release notice and are summarised as follows:

• Click and collect

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch. You can comment on the Prism blog, on Prism Ideas or contact our support team directly.

We’re pleased to announce that a new release of the Admin Console is now live.

User Management

This release brings User Management – a new option in the top bar that enables you to create and manage additional users of the Admin Console.

It gives you a list of existing users with options to edit or delete them, or to add a new user.

To add a new user you specify a username and password, their name and email address, and the features and tenancies that they can administer. Once they have access, they will be able to change their password and email address under Account settings.

The control of access to Admin features is managed at two levels: Groups and Roles. You can also specify which tenancies can be administered. Selected Groups and Roles apply equally to all of the selected tenancies for the relevant product, such as Prism. Currently, Groups and Roles are provided only for Prism. Use the arrow controls to select or de-select Groups, Roles and Tenancies for the user.

Groups are broad categories of Admin features; Roles provide access control at a more detailed level. In the cases where there is both a Group and a set of Roles, such as Prism – Moderation, if you select the Group then the user will have all of the Roles for that Group, regardless of whether you explicitly select them. So if, for example, you only want the user to be able to moderate lists but not reviews or tags, then select only the Role Prism – Moderation – Lists, and not the Group Prism Moderation.

For products where Admin Groups and Roles are defined (currently only Prism), you must select at least one Group or Role. If you select a tenancy for any other product then the user will have access to all of the Admin features for that tenancy.

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.

If you were unable to attend the Prism Development Update webinar on Monday 30th March or would like to review what we covered then you can catch up on latest developments by watching the recording of the webinar below or by downloading the video.

Highlights include:

• Prism Roadmap run-through
• Previous release features
  • Schema.org
  • Reservation workflow improvements
  • ILL fixes
• Current release features
  • Summon integration
  • Hotlinks for Resource Management
  • Fix for Resource Management with special characters in MARC 001
  • Borrower Joining expiry date fix
  • Account expiry alerts
  • Admin Console
    • Strong password policy
    • Account lockout
    • More secure password storage

We’re pleased to announce that the next release of Prism is now available for preview, and the latest release of the Admin Console is now live.

This release includes:

• Summon search service integrated in Prism
• Show expiry date in My Account
• Account expiry date for online joiners fix
• E-resource links in records uploaded via Resource Management
• Resource Management control number characters fix
• Account lockout after 5 incorrect log in attempts to the Admin Console
• Mandatory password strength when changing Admin Console password
• Improved security in storage of passwords for the Admin Console

Summon search service integrated in Prism

Libraries that use the Summon resource discovery service can now offer their users the option to search Summon from within Prism. This is the second resource discovery service integration in Prism, following the integration of EBSCO DS.

The Summon search integration allows users to find and link to your subscribed journal articles and other e-resources. Facets allow search results to be refined, including scholarly article, peer reviewed, format, discipline, subject, publication date and more. The Admin Console Prism Facets area includes the Summon facet options, allowing you to show or hide them and to alter their display order. You can also use expert search qualifiers for more precision, such as title, author, subject and format.

You can view a demo of this integration on our demonstration tenancy.

To have Summon added as a search target in Prism you need a Connect for Summon licence. For more information please contact your Account Manager.

Show expiry date in My Account

When users view their account they will see the date their account expires, and they will be warned when it is due to expire within 60 days and when it has expired. The ‘Change PIN’ tab has been re-labeled as ‘Settings’ and it displays the account expiry date as well as the Change PIN form. When the account is due to expire within 60 days, or when it has expired, an alert is displayed directly below the account summary with an appropriate message including the expiry date.

In all cases there is also a ‘Learn more’ link to a new ‘Account Expiry’ page explaining why accounts expire, what it means, and what to do about it. You can customise this text by uploading a file account-expiry.html, containing the page content fragment, to your tenancy’s Theme in the Admin Console, and you can provide translations by uploading additional theme files with the appropriate language code in the filename, for example account-expiry.cy-gb.html.

Account expiry date for online joiners fix

The online joining form in Prism will now set the new borrower’s expiry date according to the rules configured in your LMS, pulling this form in line with Soprano and Alto.

 
E-resource links in records uploaded via Resource Management

Prism can display links to e-resources from two different data elements: one is hotlinks, which are obtained dynamically via the LDS, and the other is electronic location and access, stored in the Prism data and derived from MARC field 856. Some libraries suppress the display of the electronic location and access links because they tend to duplicate the hotlinks. However, records uploaded to Prism via Resource Management and those returned from other sources via API, such as EDS and Summon, do not have hotlinks.

With this release, when there is no hotlink, Prism generates a hotlink-style display from electronic location and access data derived from MARC field 856. This means that the optimal approach now is to suppress the display of electronic location and access links because all required links will display as hotlinks. For help in suppressing the display of electronic location and access links, please open a Support case.

Resource Management control number characters fix

Some records that have been uploaded to Prism via Resource Management are from  suppliers whose control numbers include characters such as space, slash and plus. When selecting such records from Prism search results, the response has been ‘not found’.

Prism now replaces characters from MARC field 001 other than A-Z, a-z, 0-9 and underscore with an underscore, which fixes the problem.

To make this fix apply retrospectively you will need to re-load affected records – after this release has gone live. Suppress or delete Resource Management collections where the problem exists, and re-upload the records to a new collection.

Account lockout after 5 incorrect log in attempts to the Admin Console

To improve the safety and security of your Admin Console account, we have now instituted a password lockout policy, making an account unavailable for a short amount of time if an incorrect password is provided repeatedly.

After 5 incorrect attempts, an “are you human” verification is enacted, requiring you to tick a checkbox, and sometimes solve a CAPTCHA, to continue logging in. If you fail this verification 5 times, or verify successfully, but still use the wrong password, your account will be locked for a period of 10 minutes. This safeguard is to protect against people trying to guess, or brute-force, your account.

If you are having trouble accessing your account, or require the password changing because you have mislaid it, please open a support request and we’ll reset it manually for you.

As an added safeguard, we also strongly suggest enabling 2 factor authentication for your account, which can be set up from the ‘Account Settings’ panel. There are several freely available authentication applications available for all major mobile phone platforms, including Authy and Google Authenticator.

Mandatory password strength when changing Admin Console password

As a further safeguard for your account, we are now enforcing a mandatory “strong password” policy for all Admin Console accounts. This will take effect whenever you elect to change your password. Passwords should contain a mix of upper-case and lower-case characters, numbers, and preferably symbols (e.g. !”£$%^&*(){}[]:;@’~#.?/¬`). Additionally, runs of characters (e.g. qwertyuiop) will be flagged as being insecure, as will common dictionary words and known-weak passwords (e.g. password123 etc.).

To help you choose a strong password, we have added a password strength meter to the Change Password screen:

Password Strength

To successfully change your password, your new one will need to be at least ‘Good’, as indicated on the strength meter.

Improved security in storage of passwords for the Admin Console

As part of our continual internal code reviews, we’ve made the way we store passwords more secure. This change is transparent and happens behind-the-scenes the next time you login to the Admin Console. The new password storage scheme protects against “brute forcing” in the unlikely event that the scrambled version of your password was ever obtained. We’ve ensured the system is future-proof by choosing a system that allows us to increase the strength of the scheme as computers become more powerful.

 
Making the most of your preview

Please check the preview version as early as possible to familiarise with the new functionality and to ensure that your tenancy still behaves as expected in terms of both functionality, including extensions, and styling.

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.

Release to the live service

The release of Prism to the live service will be on Monday 13th April 2015.

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.

We’re pleased to announce that the latest release of the Admin Console is now live.

This release includes:

• Prism:
  • Redesigned editor for Prism themes
• Notifications
  • Ability to schedule a “one-off” rule
  • Validation of mandatory fields when adding a rule
  • Adding name of rule to deletion modal dialogue
  • Rule parameters multiple value selection now uses a control with ability to move values into and out of a ‘selected’ box
  • Improvement to notifications editor to stop the page jumping around in certain browsers

Prism – Theme Editor

We’ve re-organised the Prism Theme editor in this release, and at the same time added some features to make it easier to manage and experiment with themes.

The most noticable difference is the adoption of a ‘tabbed’ interface, allowing us to move the ‘Upload File’ and ‘Upload Zip’ forms from the bottom of the page, making them quicker to access. Alongside these existing options, we also have three new features: ‘Edit File’, ‘Create File’ and ‘Migrate Theme’.

We’ve also added a link to the latest revision of the Prism Style Guide into the alert at the top of the page. You can now also dismiss this alert for the remainder of your session by clicking the “x” in the top right corner.

Edit File

To make it quicker and easier to try out new styling in your theme, we’ve added the ability to edit your files in situ. The editor we’ve chosen works on modern browsers (IE8 and up, recent Firefox and Chrome versions), and offers a wealth of features tailored to working with CSS, HTML and JavaScript files. These include:

• Autocomplete: as you type CSS property names, JavaScript method names or HTML tags, the editor suggests possible values.
• Smart indentation: the editor knows about the best way to indent CSS, Javascript, HTML and XML, and will do this automatically when you press enter to go to the next line.
• Warnings/errors: CSS rules that could be problematic, or syntax errors in other files, are highlighted with either a warning flag, or an exclamation mark depending on the severity.
• Find/replace: when using the editor, pressing CTRL-F or CTRL-H opens a find and/or replace dialogue respectively.
• Theme support: if you’d rather work with a darker background to reduce eye strain, simply select one of the dark themes. This setting is saved in a cookie and should persist the next time you use the editor.

Once you’ve finished editing a file and clicked on the ‘Save’ button, simply reset your tenant cache to see the changes reflected in your theme.

Create File

In tandem with the ability to edit files, Create File allows you to add a text based file (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, .ini/config file and plain text) to your theme without the need to upload a blank file. You can create subdirectories by using forward slashes in the file name, e.g. path/to/new/file.html.

To ensure you can’t accidentally overwrite an existing file, the Admin Console checks to see whether a file of the same name already exists, and warns you if so.

Migrate Theme

Every Prism customer has two tenancies by default, their ‘Live’ and their ‘Sandbox’. We always suggest working on any changes in your Sandbox first, before copying them to your Live tenancy. Previously this was accomplished by downloading a theme backup from the Sandbox and uploading it to the Live tenancy.

‘Migrate theme’ makes this process much quicker, allowing you to migrate the entire theme, or just your tenancy specific stylesheet file(s).

The usual process will now be to visit your Sandbox tenancy, migrate the theme from your Live tenancy, make changes, and then migrate from Sandbox to Live – all without having to download and edit files locally on your computer.

Notifications

One-off Rules

We’ve now added the ability to create a special ‘one-off’ rule, that will send a notification on a specified date, rather than running on a regular basis. When adding the rule you now have the option to set the schedule to ‘Once’ or ‘Recurring’. When ‘Once’ is selected you can specify a date and time.

Mandatory Field Validation

When adding a rule, you’ll now be prompted with a warning message to fill in certain required fields, rather than defaults being provided which could previously be accepted inadvertently.

Deletion Modal Dialogue

If you have a long list of inactive rules and are in the process of cleaning them up, confirming you’re deleting the intended rule is important. To that end we’ve now added the name of the rule you are about to delete to the modal dialogue that pops up asking for confirmation.

Selecting multiple values for rule parameters

We’ve had some feedback that selecting multiple parameter values when creating a rule can be a bit cumbersone, especially if you have a long list of values. We’ve now adopted a similar selection widget to that used in the Prism Facets section of the Admin Console to make this a bit easier.

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.

If you were unable to attend the Prism Development Update webinar on Monday 7th July or would like to review what we covered then you can catch up on latest developments by watching the recording of the webinar below or by downloading the video.

Highlights include:

• Prism Roadmap run-through
• Latest release
  • Resource Management: upload and manage records via the Admin Console
• Developments in progress
  • Reservation queue position in My Account > Reservations
  • Various fixes and improvements
  • Work-level grouping of results (‘FRBRisation’)
  • Consortial catalogues

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:

• Resource Management

• Use of question mark in queries

Resource Management

Resource Management allows you efficiently to manage metadata workflows associated with collections of resources. Uploading files of records directly to Prism, you can provide for discovery and access to resources and maintain an accurate representation of your collections. This can be used for any collection where MARC records are provided and there is no need for them in the LMS database, such as Demand Driven Acquisition plans and subscription collections of ebooks or ejournals.

The latest release of the Admin Console includes a new ‘Resource Management’ option in the Prism section. This allows you to create and manage collections by uploading files of MARC records directly to Prism.

It provides your list of resource collections and the option to add a new collection. Each collection has a name, a provider, a status, a count of the records representing the resources in the collection, and options to edit, suspend, or delete the collection. When the status is ‘Active’ the resources are discoverable in Prism. You can temporarily remove them from being discoverable in Prism simply by clicking ‘Suspend’; the button changes to ‘Resume’, allowing you to restore discoverability with another click. You might use this to suspend a Demand Driven Acquisition plan. The Delete button removes the collection and all its records.

To add a collection you specify a few details and upload a MARC file from your computer or network. To update a collection with addition, change or deletion records, you Edit the collection and upload the relevant file. When you add a collection, as well as specifying the name, provider and status, you can select one or more Locations (this is optional and provides ‘Library Location’ facet entries from your data), and you must select at least one ‘Collection’ (the kind defined in the LMS), such as ‘Main Catalogue’, to include the records within the scope of your catalogue.

To try out Resource Management without affecting your live catalogue you can upload data to your sandbox tenancy – select the ‘-sandbox’ Prism tenancy when you go into the Admin Console. Uploaded active data will appear only in your sandbox Prism catalogue. This means you can upload and play with any files, such as those for DDA plans and subscription collections that you have already processed for the live catalogue.

Use of question mark in queries

This fixes a problem where searches for titles ending in a question mark were finding no results because the question mark is the wildcard symbol. Now, a question mark at the end of the query is ignored, so queries such as these work: ‘Why  ‘Is multiculturalism bad for women?’ and ‘You talkin’ to me?’.

Making the most of your preview

The Admin Console release is live, at https://admin.librarymanagementcloud.co.uk. The Prism 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.

Release to the live service

The release of Prism to the live service will be next week, w/b 30th June 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.

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 this 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 24^th 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.

If you were unable to attend the Prism Development Update webinar on Monday 3rd February or would like to review what we covered then you can catch up on latest developments by watching the recording of the webinar below or by downloading the video.

Highlights include:

• Prism Roadmap run-through
• Forthcoming release
  • Spelling Suggestions improvements
  • Year Published facet range slider tool
  • Autocomplete in search
  • Reviews from users
  • Upload item images for material with no standard identifier
  • Reserved loan indicator