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.

I’m pleased to announce the release of the latest version of Prism to the live service last night. This version has been available for preview since 5th September and was described in detail in the preview release notice. The main inclusions are:

• Prism Mobile Interface, making your Prism catalogue into a mobile ‘web app’, optimised for viewing on all modern smart phones
• Improvements to CSS for themes, optimising performance
• Support for additional LDS authentication methods
• Tiny images on account pages, for more items displayed per screen

The Mobile Interface requires a modification to the tenancy configuration and we recommend you test this on your sandbox tenancy before putting it live. If you raise a service request we will add the configuration to your tenancy as soon as possible.

The improvements to CSS for themes will be switched on together with the Mobile Interface. It is being managed this way because there may be some issues with the display arising from the interaction with your local customised styling. Introducing it on the sandbox tenancy first, together with the Mobile Interface, will allow any such issues to be addressed before putting it live.

You can read much more about the Mobile Interface and the CSS improvements in the posts on Mobile interface configuration and Prism 3 calling: introducing our mobile device interface

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

This post is an addendum to the existing Prism 3 Design Guidelines focusing on the new features that come as part of the mobile interface and its related release.

Enabling the Mobile Interface

Currently, because it requires checks with theme compatibility, mobile is turned on by sending a service request to the Help desk. We will

Turning the interface on by default has two effects: enabling the mobile interface and enabling html5.

Mobile Interface

When enabled, the main effect of the mobile interface is that it will add extra CSS that overrides existing themes when in a mobile context. These changes are adaptive, which means that when you size a modern browser like Chrome or Firefox or IE9 to the targeted window size the mobile interface will come into effect.

Extra features are also enabled such as swipe-based paging and background loading of search results. However, these feature rely on modern HTML5 features that are only available in recent browsers and so may not be present if you view the page on an older desktop browser; Prism will still work as normal though.

Note: Because of the way the mobile interface overrides styles, the system will strip out !important declarations as these may prevent those overrides.

HTML5

The Prism mobile interface makes use of a number of features from the new version of HTML (the markup language of the web). Since we’re using these modern features, we’ll switch the DOCTYPE to indicate HTML5.

This has the additional bonus of forcing Internet Explorer 6 to use its standards rendering mode, which means it behaves more like modern browsers. This may mean you find themes designed assuming IE6 quirks mode may look odd. Fortunately the new release also has some additional features designed to help targeting older versions of Internet Explorer, see CSS Browser Targeting below, allowing much easier targeting of corrective measures.

Customising the Mobile Interface

The mobile interface is a series of additional stylesheets and behaviours for small devices. It aims for a more “app-like” feel, which focuses on core tasks and their requisite elements of the interface, often hiding extra detail behind reveals to optimise for the small screen size.

Because mobile is a more fragmented space than desktop, where slight changes can have major impacts you might not see on one particular phone, the mobile interface has a more restricted set of configuration options. This makes the theme more reliable across devices and enables us to fix in one place rather than across multiple tenancies.

Configuration is achieved by creating a file called config.ini that you upload as part of your theme files via the admin console. It goes in the base of the theme so you can update it as a single file without re-uploading the entire theme. Rather than write CSS rules it allows you to specify parameters that we turn into CSS for you. This means you don’t have to worry about browser inconsistencies, since we handle that for you.

A config.ini looks like this (note lines may wrap and {tenancy} should be replaced with your tenancy):

;this is a comment...
 [Mobile]

touch_icon = //prism.talis.com/{tenancy}/assets/-/images/start_icon.png

mobile_header_background = //prism.talis.com/{tenancy}/assets/-/assets/images/mobile_header.png

mobile_form_element_border = #E3E5F5
mobile_form_element_background = #fff
mobile_form_button_background = #fafafa

mobile_tag_background = #D2E3FF
mobile_tag_border = #80B2FF
mobile_tag_text_colour = #333

mobile_text_colour = #222
mobile_link_colour = #28489D

You can create this file in Notepad or any other text editor, simply make sure it is saved with the .ini extension. The initial set of configurable parameters is conservative and allows for form element styling, facet/tag styling and main text colouration. It also allows you to specify the background image for the application title and the touch icon used when creating a shortcut icon on iPhone/iPad.

The web addresses for these image should be full urls, with a protocol independent uri so they work under both secure and insecure connections. Note the lack of http: prefixing the web addresses used, for example:

//prism.talis.com/{tenancy}/assets/-/images/start_icon.png

The sizes for iOS start icons are 57×57 pixels. You can learn more about these on Apple’s Developer Site.

You may also want to specify a custom background for the application header. This sits at the top of all pages in the mobile interface behind the main application title. It should be 50px high, by a maximum of 470px wide. Note that the 470px is a maximum and that the image will be truncated on smaller screens. Also note that the icon shown by default is 40px by 40px, so if you want to substitute in your own this is the size to use.

Extra Links

Mobile hides header and footer fragment detail to save space and focus on the core functionality. There may be items, such as links to terms and conditions, that you are required to include a link to and wish to re-instate on mobile. Be cautious of what you choose to add, since it is far easier to overload the interface on a mobile device than on a desktop.

The best option for adding such extra links is to add this to the headerlinks.html fragment as a menu item, giving it the class of mobile. This will hide it on desktop devices, but place it in the openable menu on the top of the screen should access be needed:

For example:

<ul>
    <li class="mobile"><a href="{url}mobilehelp.html">Mobile Help</a></li>
</ul>

Javascript Extensions

If you make use of any extensions to the Prism interface, image carousels or similar via either Juice or jQuery, you may wish to disable these when mobile is enabled as they may cause slowness due to extra network requests and more involved scripting.

You can set these to not run when mobile is enabled by checking the PRISM.mobile object property in Javascript. This is set to true when the main window is smaller than the 480px that triggers the mobile interface. You can then turn of features that aren’t suitable to run in a mobile context.

if(PRISM.mobile){
 //code to run mobile essential extensions
 }
 else{
 //code to run normally
 }

You could also modify how Juice is included in the page to use this too, reducing your downloads on mobile devices even further. So for example, the following could be added to your javascript.html fragment:

<script type="text/javascript">
    $(function(){
        if(!PRISM.mobile){
                $('body').append('<script type="text/javascript" src="http://prism.talis.com/{tenancy-name}/assets/-/juice.js"></script>');
            }
    })
</script>

This would only include the juice.js file if mobile is not enabled.

If you are using extensions, we recommend you move to using the version of jQuery bundled with Prism, to avoid downloading the same library multiple times.

Additional Features

The release with mobile also includes a number of additional features that improve the handling of CSS.

CSS browser targeting

The new release includes a more robust method of targeting older versions of Internet Explorer with CSS rules to account for browser quirks. By prefixing a CSS selector with a particular class you can target older versions of the browser with specific fixes. For example:

 .item{
 width:98%;
 }

.ie6 .item{
 width:100%;
 }

would declare a normal width on newer browsers of 98%, but force IE6 to set the width to 100%. This method prevents the use of ugly and problematic “CSS hacks” that can cause unexpected behaviour.

CSS Merging

The new CSS handler features a number of improvements to the way CSS is served to the browser.

Firstly we merge the files together, reducing network requests. Where previously we linked to three files base.css, site.css and print.css, these files are now wrapped together as one, with the mobile interface included as well if enabled. This merged file has a url of assets/{etag}/merged.css , which means it looks like it’s in your theme so existing image references work.

When this file is served it is sent with far future expiring cache headers which means that the file will always be cached, reducing requests for large CSS files and speeding your catalogues display. If you change your site.css or config.ini, or we release a new version of Prism, the file’s web address changes automatically so the updated CSS will be downloaded.

Note: Because we now merge CSS, if your theme uses @import rules, which must appear at the top of the file to work. These will now need to be actually included in the site.css file. This is best practice as it allows us to reduce network requests and force caching.

Interface Labels

Mobile makes use of several interface labels that have previously been hidden (the main application title) or are new (mobile introductory text). These can be customised as with any interface label in Prism. The default for application title is “Talis Prism”, but you may prefer a shorted version of your institution name with “Library Catalogue” added. Please raise a service request with the required text and we will configure it for you.

We’re pleased to announce the release of the new Prism Design Guidelines.

As Prism evolved and the number of implementations grew, we realised that the existing design guidelines needed to be more comprehensive. We wanted to produce a set of guidelines that would answer common support queries and ensure customers producing their own themes had a solid grounding in the logic of the theme system.

So we set about rewriting the existing guidelines from the ground up. The aim is that the new guidelines can be a desk reference for a freelancer, in house web designer or systems librarian who wants to customise Prism.

The new guidelines cover a variety of topics including:

• Page Fragments
• Markup Structure
• Building Flexible Designs & Future Proofing
• Using the Admin Console

There’s also plenty of helpful hints on optimisation, development tools, reference works and commonly encountered issues.

Like Prism itself these guidelines are an evolving document and we’ll be integrating feedback and improving them as new features are released. So please do download them and let us know if there are areas you’d like to see covered in more detail.

Download the Prism Design Guidelines.

We’ve just pushed a small update to the release preview which addresses some confusion end users experienced with the “Save” button. A new button has been added to the search results page labelled “Check Availability” which, when clicked, opens the item details page.

Check Availability Button

You may need to reset your tenant cache on preview if you’ve looked at it recently to pick up the new button; to do this please append resettenantcache to the release preview URL, e.g.

http://prism.talis.com/demo/derby-ac/resettenantcache

We’ve had to change the HTML on the search results page slightly to fit this in, so if everyone could take a few minutes to check it works with their local styling we’d really appreciate it.

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 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.

The latest release of Prism, when supplied with data from the new MarcGrab, re-models title and statement of responsibility information from MARC field 245, analysing the different kinds of data that MARC often lumps together, to make better use of it. One benefit of this is that any number-and-name-of-part information embedded in subfield $c (statement of responsibility, etc) is now appended to the main title so that you can see all of the precise title information together. Another benefit is the display of the statement of responsibility.

Historically, a General Material Designator (GMD) has been added to title information to give some indication of the kind of material of the item. However, its general nature has always been unsatisfactory because users want more precise information, and this is why, in the new cataloguing rules, RDA, the GMD is dropped in favour of more specific alternatives. For these reasons we have omitted the GMD.

A better alternative to the GMD is accurate format information, presented so the user can see at a glance what it is. The format is already in a regular position at the beginning of a line, but to improve its display we’re proposing the following changes:

• Move the summary snippet to the foot of the entry
• Select the most specific format term, where more than one is currently given, according to a preference list. For example, select ‘eBook’ from ‘Electronic resource, eBook, Book’
• Display the selected format in bold
• Place the edition statement and the year of publication, in that order, after the language, to give more prominence to these important elements
• Change the label ‘Published’ to ‘Publisher’ and unbold it by default, so that it does not distract attention from the earlier elements.

It is posible to hide the language and publisher elements with styling tools (a simple update to you site.css file). It is also possible to hide just the default language, that is, the language of your catalogue, usually ‘English’. For details of how to apply these changes, or to request us to do it for you, please raise a Support case.

This proposal is only about results entries, not the Item Detail page. There are other issues and ideas for the Item Detail page, which will be addressed later.

We’ve put together some examples. Please click on the image to get a full size view. Cover images have been omitted from the examples but they would be there, as now, in the implementation.

We’d love to hear your views on this proposal. Please comment on this blog post, or you can email me terry.willan@capita.co.uk. As soon as a favourable consensus is clear we’ll start work on this with a view to getting it into the next release of Prism.

In the past month or so, we have seen six libraries go live with Talis Prism 3. Wolverhampton Libraries went live with their Talis designed catalogue, matching the design they have adopted for their community information system. Duncan Fellows explains, “We went with the Talis Design service as we did not have the in-house skills. I gave them a very open brief as we wanted to give them the freedom to do what they are good at, design. Having the same design [as Talis Engage] and using corporate colours will hopefully mean the products are instantly recognisable as ours.”

East Lothian Library Service has gone straight-to-live with their new catalogue, automatically redirecting all traffic from the old Prism 2 URL through to the new site. The homepage now includes a number of new features, all designed with the user in mind. Quick links to other parts of the library service, a bestsellers list for the current month and latest library news can all be accessed from the catalogue homepage. Donna Duff, Acting Senior Librarian (Adult Services) explains – “Users of the new catalogue will have access to the catalogue’s enriched content which offers book jackets, synopsis notes, CD track listings and DVD information. This allows us to showcase our collections and stock holdings in a much more visual and dynamic way.

North Yorkshire library service and Trafford Libraries are both parallel running their new catalogues alongside their previous ones to get feedback from the public and staff alike.

On the academic customer side, the University of Portsmouth and Birmingham City University are both now live, parallel running alongside their Talis Prism 2 catalogue. Both Portsmouth and BCU designed their own catalogue, giving them a clean look and intuitive navigation.

Looking at the Google Analytics, we can see that so far this year there have been over 1.6 million online visitors to Talis Prism 3 catalogues. These visits have resulted in over 9.1 million individual page impressions. We also saw that across all catalogues, Talis Prism 3 was accessed from a total of 187 different countries. As the status monitor shows, all this has been possible with only four minutes of downtime so far this year.

One of the things we’ve been keen to do for a while is re-assess presentation of the “My Account” pages in Prism 3. This has been dependent on another piece of work, improvements to the Local Data Services (LDS) that pass information back to Prism 3 from your local LMS. This does mean that some of these modifications are dependent on installation of the newer LDS at your site.

Reasons for the Changes

One of the most requested additions to Prism 3 was the Loan History, we’re going to add this, but we’re also taking the opportunity to look at how we deliver account information overall.

Similarly to how we approached the availability redesign earlier in the year, what we wanted to focus on was:

• How can we make the complex data as people-centric as possible?
• How can we make the common tasks easier?
• How can we make the information easy to comprehend?

So in this post, we’ll take a look at some of the concepts we’re working with. Please do provide feedback and remember these are mockups rather than final designs so subject to change. Also, it’s worth remembering that these are defaults that can be over-ridden by custom css or interface labels. We’ll also be looking at further changes earlier next year as part of the “improvements to my account efficiency” roadmap item.

Breaking the Data into Manageable Chunks

Our first task with the account pages of Prism was to break the data into more manageable, compartmentalised chunks. Currently everything about an account appears on one page, and this will get pretty big, pretty fast, so we wanted to move each section of my account to its own sub-page.

This means each task has its own context to work in resulting in pages for:

• Current Loans
• Charges
• Reservations
• Bookings
• Loan History
• Inter Library Loans

There’s been some discussion on how this is to be split up, with the issue of whether Bookings and Reservations are different enough in the minds of library users. Currently we’re erring on the side of keeping them separate, but we’d be interested in your thoughts on this.

The Account Summary

At the top of the accounts pages we’ve realigned the summary details, in much the same way as we did with availability, to be simple statements making for a more “human” page. We’ve also made it persist through the various account pages, acting as a “notifications area” to summarise items that need action (reservation pickups, charges and so on). We’ll also use this area for confirmation of actions.

A subtle change here is that the charges indicator contains the total including currently accruing fines, where previously these were only shown as part of the loans (something that confused users).

Beneath the summary, the navigation between the various sections of the account pages will be by mini-tabs. This is a nice simple metaphor for this type of content, allowing easy movement between the various sub-sections along with highlighting current location.

Current Loans

Here we’ve put the information that the majority of users need most of the time and made it the default page when you log in. We’ve taken a look at the Google analytics and the common paths involve going in and renewing, so we want to make this as easy as possible. So we’ve added a “renew all” button, to speed the most common use case, that of “I can’t get to the library, so need to renew all my current loans”.

We’re improving this by adding in the jacket image and a link to the item in question. We’ve also removed some of the detail that really isn’t needed by most users: item ID and control number. This was a hard choice, but scenarios in which these would be useful are fairly limited in this context.

A useful piece of feedback we got from libraries was that showing the renew count out of a total would be really useful, so we’re hoping to add this too.

We’re also adding in several cues as to the state of individual items. We’re looking at several options for the exact nature of this display. The one shown above is a simple enhancement to the existing tables. Where an item is overdue it turns a shade of red and bolded.

The second option is adds an additional collation of items so that common dates act as headings (much like an email client might). So you can see “overdue”, “due back this week”, “due back this month” and “due later” to help as a cue for what needs attention now.

Loan History

The Loan History pages have the potential to contain a huge amount of data, especially if a library user has had an account for several decades and borrowed books every few weeks in that time. Thus the Loan History page needs to be broken down into manageable chunks.

The history can be re-ordered by the title, main author and loan dates; each version of the navigation provides its own paging mechanism.

Reservations, Bookings and Inter-library Loans

Although the concepts may be different, the mechanics of checking these three elements online are very similar, so the interfaces here differ only in the labels.

Again, the basic changes are to add in the book covers, links to the books and highlighting of common actions. A simple statement of entitlement is an element we hope to add to allow people to manage their account more efficiently and again we’ve added a cancel all button.

Charges

The charges page has only a few minor improvements. We’ve included the summary and with the improved LDS service we can fix the missing accrual date problem. As mentioned earlier, the totals now represent the current total owed, including currently accruing items.

Next Steps

The key aim of this work is to add in the loan history work, break the account pages into manageable chunks and integrate it more completely into the rest of the product. Although it mainly addresses the “Loan History” roadmap item it also paves the way for future work including the “improvements to my account efficiency” item.

Please do let us know if there are issues we haven’t considered either here or via email.