I’m pleased to announce that a new version of Prism is now available for you to preview, together with a new release of the Admin Console.

Community Collaboration

This Prism release brings the first of the community collaboration features: user contributed star ratings.

The ability to rate an item gives the user a basic level of active participation in the catalogue, allowing them to express their response to an item. The display of ratings in the catalogue serves as a guide to other users in a way that is familiar from many other places on the web.

The average rating is displayed in results and in the item detail page. You can click on it to add your own rating – you are invited to login first, then taken back where you were. On the item detail page you also get a blank set of stars on an item yet to be rated.

Once logged in, ratings can be added on both the results page and the full detail page by clicking on the number of stars you wish to give the item. You can do this whether or not the item has been rated already. Ratings can also be altered if you change your mind at a later date – the new rating replaces an older rating to prevent any one user gaming the system.

We’re aggregating ratings across libraries in two groups: academic libraries and public libraries. All ratings in your library sector will be displayed in your catalogue, giving you the greater scope and refinement of the larger scale. The average rating for an item in a library sector is displayed.

This is just the first part of a larger scheme of work around adding community features to the catalogue which will include enabling users to see and manage their contributed content.

Ratings is an optional feature, allowing you to introduce it when you feel you are ready. We’ve added a new ‘Community Features’ section to the latest release of the Admin Console, also released today, which allows you to turn the feature on or off quickly and easily. To switch on ratings, under Community Features check the Enable ratings box and click the ‘Update’ button. You also need to reset the cache for your tenancy: in a new browser window or tab run your equivalent of this: prism.talis.com/demo/mytenancy-sandbox/resettenantcache.

We always recommend that you do this first for your sandbox tenancy. All Admin Console settings apply to both the preview and live environments, so when this release of Prism goes live, any tenancy where ratings are enabled will have the feature in the live service as well as in the preview.

Electronic Location Links

This release also brings a small change to the data model to improve our handling of Electronic Location and Access (856) fields. We’re ensuring that we extract the relevant information from the field, as well as tidying up how they are displayed on the item details page. This is the first part of a larger theme of work around improving access and discovery of e-resources within Prism.

Admin Console

The new release of the Admin Console brings several key improvements, including faster browsing of files in the theme section. We’ve also taken on board all of the feedback about improving the experience when you just want to upload a single file and have remodelled this section to allow browsing through the folders that make up your theme, with uploads being stored in the folder you have active. Folders are marked as “folder” in the type column and can be navigated to by clicking on their name; a breadcrumb trail is provided to allow you to navigate back up the folder hierarchy. You cannot add or rename folders within the console: the folder structure must be created separately, zipped and uploaded – so if you’d like to add a new folder the best way is to download a theme backup, add the new folder (and files) and then use the upload zip function.

One further new area in the Admin Console is ‘Layout Modules’ allowing HTML5 rendering and the mobile interface to be enabled. If you’d like to enable the mobile interface, both of these need to be checked, but you can also just enable HTML5 if you want to take advantage of more modern web browser features without offering the mobile interface. These are both optional features as they can require a few tweaks to be made to your tenancy theme to ensure your design stays consistent. As with other features you can make adjustments in your sandbox before switching them on in your live tenancy. If you already have the Mobile interface enabled then both will be switched on by default, otherwise both will be switched off.

We’re planning on releasing these changes to the live service within the next week, so would really appreciate everyone trying these new features on their tenancy.

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 this blog, on the Prism forum and Prism Ideas or contact your account manager or the Prism team directly.

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve just released a small update to the Admin Console to take advantage of the new theme fragments in the latest release preview of Prism.

It’s now possible to upload a file to your theme called login.html or noresults.html which will be displayed on the login page and no results page respectively.

If your tenancy has the welsh language option installed, you can upload both English and Welsh versions of these files by adding language codes to the filename, e.g.

login.en-gb.html
login.cy-gb.html
noresults.en-gb.html
noresults.cy-gb.html


This release also enables the Javascript fragment, which is the suggested location for placing any Javascript includes. Placing these in a file called javascript.html and uploading it to your tenancy theme will enable this feature.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch; you can comment here, on the forums and Prism Ideas or contact your account manager or the Prism team directly.

We’re pleased to announce that the latest version of Prism has been released for everyone to preview; this release has the following changes:

Improved display of formats in initial results display for Semantic Data Model records

The Semantic Data Model title work, launched last month, makes some changes to the way we extract data from the 245 field; part of this was dropping subfield $h from the display in favour of more descriptive terms found elsewhere in a record. We’ve tweaked the search results page, as originally discussed on the blog a few weeks ago, to draw more attention to the format by making it bold and displaying the most specific term, e.g. “eBook” rather than “Book, eBook, Eletronic Resource”. The end result is a more consistent experience – borrowers only need to look in a single place as they scan the page and the terminology used is the same from record to record. We’ve made  a few other tweaks to the appearance of this page to make the layout more consistent as well. As with other Semantic Data Model features, you’ll need to be on the new version of marcgrab to see these changes.

The revised format display

Support for Audio Visual (non-ISBN) cover images

To support the upcoming switch to BDS for Prism enrichments, we’ve enabled cover images for non-ISBN records; this will show, subject to coverage, images for records that have an EAN or UPC catalogued in the 024 field. These images will start displaying once we complete the transition in the coming weeks and we’ll put out a notice when this happens. Customers with Syndetics enrichments can also benefit from this development; please raise a service request and we will make the required configuration changes to your tenancy.

Addition of two new theme fragments

A common request we receive is for more control over the “My Account” login page, so we’ve added a new theme fragment which allows you to insert content in the same way as the homepage and header fragments. We’re releasing a small update to the Admin Console early this week which will pick up a file named “login.html” that you upload to your theme and insert it into your tenancy.

Another page we’re enabling further customisation of is the no results screen. Uploading a file called “noresults.html” to your tenancy theme will include it below the existing content. This fragment is treated a bit differently to others as it allows you to access the search query and insert it into your custom content, for example in a link to another search system such as Copac, the British Library or Google Books. As with the login fragment, this also relies on the Admin Console release this week.

No results fragment linking to Copac, The British Library and Google Books

Taking advantage of this new functionality is easy, just insert the following snippet anywhere in the fragment:

{{ query }}

If you’d like to provide links to prepared searches on other discovery interfaces you’ll need to change that slightly and “url encode” it; this makes sure it’s properly formatted for use in a hyperlink:

{{ query|url_encode }}

The full example in the screenshot above is:

<p>You can also try your search for "{{ query }}" on some other catalogues:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://copac.ac.uk/search?&any={{ query|url_encode }}">Search for "{{ query }}" on COPAC</a></li>
<li><a href="http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?mode=Basic&vid=BLVU1&vl(freeText0)={{ query|url_encode }}&fn=search&tab=local_tab&">Search for "{{ query }}" on the British Library OPAC</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q={{ query|url_encode }}">Search for "{{ query }}" on Google Books</a>
</ul>

We’re planning on releasing these changes to the live service within the next week, so would really appreciate everyone trying these new features on their tenancy. As usual, you can preview this release by prepending your tenancy name with “demo/”, for example:

http://prism.talis.com/demo/manchester-ac/

or

http://prism.talis.com/demo/southwark/

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch; you can comment here, on the forums and Prism Ideas or contact your account manager or the Prism team directly.

If you were unable to attend one of our recent Prism 3 update webinars, then catch up on latest developments by watching the recording below or by downloading the video.

The agenda for this webinar was:

• Roadmap
• General update
• Admin console
• Talis Library Ideas
• Next release
• Semantic Data Model
• Questions

[podcast format=”video”]http://talis-videos.s3.amazonaws.com/prism_webinar_070211.mp4[/podcast]

We’ve released a preview version of a hotfix for two issues some customers are experiencing. The issues addressed are:

• Reset Tenant Cache failing under certain conditions
• Availability not displaying summary message under certain conditions

We are planning to release these to live early next week.

As with all previous releases, these changes can be tested by using the demo version of your site. For customers using the “prism.talis.com” domain, this is accessed by putting “demo/” just before your tenancy name, e.g.:

http://prism.talis.com/demo/leicestershire/

For customers with own hostname enabled, the “demo/” is placed at the end of your URL, e.g.:

http://catalogue.sunderland.ac.uk/demo/

If you have questions on this, or any other issue, please feel free to email phil.john@talis.com, contact your account manager, or leave a comment on the blog.

If you were unable to attend one of our recent Prism 3 update webinars, then catch up on latest developments by watching the recording below or by downloading the video. The main topics covered were:

• Introductions
• Roadmap
• General Update
  • Next release:
  • Admin Console
  • Talis Library Ideas
  • SDM
  • Roadmap next steps
    • 20% Dev time for ideas forum ideas
    • Planning for “augmented discovery”
    • Improvements to advanced search
    • Questions

The next webinar will be on Monday 23rd August, details will be posted on the Talis Prism blog shortly.

[podcast format=”video”]http://talis-videos.s3.amazonaws.com/prism_webinar_120710.mp4[/podcast]

We’re pleased to announce that the recent Prism 3 release preview has been released to the live Prism 3 environment. For further details on what has changed, please refer to the release preview blog post.

This release enables us to widen availability of the Admin Console, please contact support and raise a service request if you would like us to set up credentials for you.

Keep up with the latest Talis Prism 3 news and developments on the Talis Prism 3 website and blog.

We’ve just released the latest version of Talis Prism 3 for customers to preview; as well as a small under the hood change to improve “My Account” page rendering times, this version contains a few tweaks to the search system:

• Facets now persist when changing sort order
• Exact searches no longer widen terms to include stemmed versions
• New “series:” index name enabled
• Other small tweaks to improve the relevance of certain searches

Finally, we’ve included a method for customers who are currently using the Admin Console to force through changes immediately; this will allow us to widen availability to all customers with Prism 3.

You can access the preview by putting demo/ directly after the prism.talis.com address, for example http://prism.talis.com/demo/leicestershire/.

If you have any questions on this, or other issues, feel free to email me phil.john@talis.com or your account manager (or comment here, of course).

We’re pleased to announce the launch of admin.talis.com to an initial group of customers. We’re going to run through a programme of workflows and tests with their assistance.

Once we’ve completed this testing, and we’re satisfied everything works as intended, we’ll start enabling more tenancies. Please keep watching for announcements here, and through other channels, for more information.

In the interim, if you require any configuration changes to your tenancy, please raise a service request and we’ll do them as quickly as possible.