We’ve developed some new features and fixed some issues that improve aspects of loans, reservations and availability for your Prism users. To activate these, Prism requires an upgrade to your local data services, which is now available on request.

Key features

Renew a loan when reserved by another borrower

This feature addresses the Prism Idea ‘Option to allow renewal of reserved items’. It will take account of your LMS configuration setting for Res-Renew Due Date in your Loan Rules.

Reserve items that are not In Stock

This feature addresses the Prism Idea ‘Allowing borrowers to reserve items on order’.

Currently users can only reserve items whose status is In Stock. With this new feature you can specify other statuses that you would like to be reservable, such as items that are on order or received. Non-In stock items are not included in the reservation but the reservation is set against the work; when items change to In Stock status they will be included in the reservation automatically by a process in Alto (5.4 or higher) so that they can be used to satisfy the reservation.

Required item statuses are specified using their numeric IDs. Typically perhaps you might specify 2 (Order sent) and 3 (Received). These are set in a new parameter in your local data services, which we will update for you on request.

I’m pleased to announce that the Admin Console refresh that we have been previewing in recent webinars has now been released into the live service.

This release is primarily to support the migration to Capita Infrastructure, ensuring a seamless transition as tenancies are migrated. While we’ve aimed for feature-parity with the previous Admin Console, we’ve also taken the time to add a few new features:

• Account settings section to change password and enable optional two-step verification for accounts
• Context-sensitive help

New account settings

The Admin Console refresh has a new “Account settings” section where you can change your password, enable two-step verification and register your email address. We will be gradually expanding this area in upcoming releases to support sub-accounts and access control lists to restrict users to certain functions.

To further increase the security of your accounts, you may now opt-in to two-step verification. This uses a mobile application to generate a 6-digit code that must be supplied when logging in. There are several apps available for smartphones, including:

• Google Authenticator for iOS, Android
• Authenticator for Windows Mobile 7/7.5/8
• Any OATH TOTP compliant application

To opt-in, go to the “Account settings” section and click on the “Change” link next for “Two step verification”:

This will open a wizard that will guide you through setting up your account, and authentication device. A backup code is also provided to allow access to your account in the event of a lost phone or device.

Context sensitive help

We’ve gone through the different sections of the Admin Console and ensured that there is explanatory text available, where required, to help guide you through some of the more complex configuration options.

In addition to this, we’re producing several introductory videos focusing on specific areas and tasks within the Admin Console. We’ll post some more information when these are available.

We welcome your comments, questions and ideas on Admin Console features. You can post comments here on the blog, discuss topics in the Prism forum, raise, discuss and vote on ideas in Prism Ideas or contact your Account Manager.

I’m pleased to announce that a new version of Prism is available for you to preview. This includes a fix to the Notes display and enables Single Sign On Integration with the Central Authentication Service (CAS) system for customers who have placed an order.

Making the most of your preview

These features are now available for you to preview. We urge you to make the most of the preview period to ensure that Prism continues to work well for your catalogue.

In particular, please check that you can sign in as normal, and that multiple occurrences of notes are displaying.

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.

Notes Display issue fix

This fixes an issue where some notes (chiefly from MARC fields 500 and 504) are not displaying when there are multiple notes.

Single Sign On integration with the Central Authentication Service (CAS) system

We have made some changes to the authentication aspects of Prism to allow integration with the Central Authentication Service (CAS) system. We are delighted that this is enabling Prism’s first Single Sign On implementation to go live.

If you have not placed an order for Single Sign On there should be no change when signing in to Prism. During the preview we are advising everyone to check that you can sign in as normal.

For more information about Single Sign On please contact your Account Manager.

Release to the live service

This version of Prism will be released to the live service on Tuesday 18th December.

Comments and contact

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch. You can comment here on the blog, on the Prism forum and Prism Ideas or contact your Account Manager or the Prism team directly.

In order for Prism to reset the user’s PIN it needs to log in to your Alto system via the Local Data Services (LDS) as an operator at a particular site.

In order to configure the Reset PIN Feature you have to do four things:
1. Select an Alto login to use
2. Set that Alto login username and password within the Admin Console
3. Upload the email template that you’d like your borrowers to receive
4. Test it works.

Selecting the Alto Login to use

You can either use an existing Alto login or create a new one. Whichever you choose the login must have sufficient enablements to “View/Edit a Borrower PIN”. The actions that must be enabled are: Circulation, Borrower, Edit Borrower, and View/edit borrower PIN. These are set in Alto Configuration Setup: Parameter Management > Permissions > Rules.

The actions are associated with an Enablement Profile. This is determined by a combination of Operator Profile and Site Profile, in Alto Configuration Setup: Parameter Management > Permissions > Enablements Link.

An Operator login ID is linked to an Operator Profile in Alto Configuration Setup: Parameter Management > Names > Operators > Operators.

A Site code is linked to a Site Profile in Alto Configuration Setup: Parameter Management > Names > Location > Sites.

Adding the login to the Admin Console

Prism has a default Operator ID and Password which may work depending on your Alto configuration settings. You can specify an Operator ID and Password for Prism to use, in the Admin Console > LDS Operator area. When you have updated the LDS Operator you must reset the tenant cache for your catalogue.

Your LDS has a set of configured parameters including Site. Currently you are not able to access these; that will be provided in the Admin Console in due course. Often the Site is set to TWOC. If you are not sure which Site code your LDS is using, please open a Support case asking us to look it up for you.

You may have a policy of changing passwords regularly. This might affect your choice of Operator. Even if you would prefer to not have to remember to change the Operator Password configured for the Prism LDS regularly, it is important that you have the ability to do so, and to be able to change it at any time if, for example, the password has been compromised.

Uploading the email template

You can provide your own email text by creating and uploading a file called resetpin.txt and/or resetpin.locale.txt to your tenancy theme in the Admin Console. The resetpin.locale.txt file is for a different interface language, where locale is the locale code, for example resetpin.cy-gb.txt. In these files you can insert the following two tags:

• {{ reset_link }} – mandatory, to give the link to the PIN reset page
• {{ borrower_name }} – optional, allowing you to address the borrower by name, e.g. ‘Dear {{ borrower_name }}, …’.

Finally, testing…

Using one of your test borrower accounts within the LMS confirm it has your email address listed as the default email address. This will be used to send you the reset PIN email.

Open Prism and go to the login page, press the ‘Reset your PIN’ link and follow the instructions. You should receive an email using your provided email template allowing you to reset your library system PIN. Follow the prism.talis.com link within the email, provide your new PIN and you should see a confirmation message.

I’m pleased to announce that a new version of Prism is available for you to preview.

Forgotten PIN link

 The Account log in page now has a link that enables users to reset their PIN if they have an email address registered with the library (in their Alto borrower record). Clicking the link brings up a new page where you type your borrower number and click a Reset PIN link. This sends an email to your registered email address with a link to a web page where you can enter a new PIN and click the Reset PIN button to submit it. Then you can immediately sign in to Prism with your new PIN.

If users don’t have an email address registered with the library then following the Reset PIN feature leads to a page saying ‘Unable to send PIN reset email’. The PIN reset link in the email remains active for ten minutes, after which it goes to a ‘Reset PIN link expired’ page. In that case you can start again.

This feature comes with a default email template, but you can provide your own email text by uploading a file called resetpin.txt and/or resetpin.locale.txt to your tenancy theme in the Admin Console. The resetpin.locale.txt file is for a different interface language, where locale is the locale code, for example resetpin.cy-gb.txt. In these files you can insert the following two tags:

• {{ reset_link }} – mandatory, to give the link to the PIN reset page
• {{ borrower_name }} – optional, allowing you to address the borrower by name, e.g. ‘Dear {{ borrower_name }}, …’.

Pay Now link to pay charges

This requires our ePayments Integration module.

 

When users have charges on their library account and  view them under the Charges tab in Prism, a ‘Pay Now’ button will display. This takes you to the institutional ePayment page and allows you to pay your charges using the payment service provider chosen by your institution. If your library hasn’t got the ePayment module, or you would wish this to be enabled then please contact libraries-sales@captia.co.uk for more details.

Next steps

I’m pleased to announce that a new version of Prism is available for you to preview.

Viewing Everybody’s lists

It’s good to see that libraries are enabling the recent list sharing functionality. It has been found that ‘Everybody’s lists’ does not display as quickly as it should, so we have made a change and it is now much quicker.

Renewal outcomes

We’ve made an adjustment to the re-designed display of renewal outcomes that was welcomed in the previous release. When renewal is disallowed, the explanatory message is now displayed across the bottom of the specific item row(s) rather than being pinned to the top of the browser window. A single alert message is displayed at the top of the page indicating the number of items that failed to renew.

When a renewal action is completely successful (for a single item or ‘Renew All’), no banner message is displayed at the top of the page – success is indicated by the change in the button text and colour.

Contents notes – not available in Preview

We have fixed an issue with the contents notes display, which was omitting some data originating from repeated MARC 505 fields. Although this change is not available in preview (because it requires affected records to be updated, or dummy edited, in live), this new feature will be available once the new changes are rolled out live.

Privacy statement covering EU Cookie Compliance

A privacy statement page is included in this release, covering the collection of personal information and the usage of cookies. During the preview you can see the privacy page in your tenancy at prism.talis.com/demo/{tenancy}/privacy.

We recommend that you update your corporate privacy statement with the details about Prism, and then put a link to it in your Prism footer. This gives you complete control of the privacy statement. Alternatively, you can put a link in your Prism footer to the privacy statement page which is part of Prism; in this case, please remember to omit the ‘/demo’ part of the URL, which should take the form prism.talis.com/{tenancy}/privacy. Also please note that the page at this URL will only be available after release to the live service.

Making the most of your preview

We urge you to make the most of the preview period to explore the changes and to ensure that Prism continues to work well for your catalogue. Please ensure that there are no problems with your local styling; there is nothing in this release that should affect styling or extensions in tenancies that adhere to the Prism design guidelines (pdf), but now is the time to find out if there are any issues, before release to the live service.

We plan to roll these changes out to to the live service on Wednesday 29th August. This provides a longer preview period than usual to provide customers that are on holiday an opportunity to test this new release prior to go live.

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:  prism.talis.com/demo/{tenancy}/. 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 issues please open a Support case and begin the subject line with ‘Prism Preview’ – this will help us to respond to any queries quickly.

Furthermore, we love to hear your comments, questions and ideas on Prism features. You can post comments here on the blog, discuss topics in the Prism forum, raise, discuss and vote on ideas in Prism Ideas or contact your account manager or the Prism team directly.

I’m pleased to announce that the recent preview release of Prism has now been deployed to the live service.  For full details on the inclusions please visit the preview release notice.

Additionally, a change to the Admin Console has been released to the live service: in the Community Features area you can now enable Open Graph meta data to support the Facebook ‘Like’ feature and some search engines, and you can optionally set your Facebook app id to override the system default.

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.

I’m pleased to announce that a new version of Prism is  available for you to preview.

Reserve button displays only when the item is reservable

This has been the top requirement in Prism Ideas. It has now been implemented in a combination of the Local Data Services and Prism.

When there are no reservable copies a different button  displays with configurable text – the default is ‘Not  Reservable’. When clicked, an information box pops up with  an explanation (this is also configurable text).

When the user is not signed in, this happens for those  items where no copies are reservable by anyone, such as  electronic resources and reference material. When the user  is signed in the system applies further rules to identify  cases where there are no reservable copies for the current borrower type, or the specific borrower has a condition where reservation is denied, such as having reached their reservation limit, or being blocked.

This feature requires an upgrade to the latest version of  the Local Data Services (LDS) which is currently being  rolled out, prioritised by need and request. To register  for your LDS upgrade, please open a support case or contact your account manager.

Next and Previous buttons

These allow browsing back and forth in results quickly at the item detail level. Preserving the context is crucial for this feature and it does that even when the URL for an item detail page is saved and used again later.

Renewal workflow

The re-designed process for renewing loans aims to make it quicker, more informative and easier to see the outcomes. It all happens in the loans page quickly without refreshing the page, temporarily changing the Renew button and displaying a message pinned to the top of the screen to give the outcome for each item. A single exception message is displayed even when the system identifies multiple exceptions, selected from a preference order, so that the user is not overloaded with information.

Notes data

This has been completely re-modelled. Notes data is no longer duplicated and data order is preserved from repeats of the same MARC field. Contents notes are structured and displayed in a more readable way, including a link to view the content in a lightbox pop-up. All standard MARC notes (5XX fields) that are relevant to public display are included. BBFC film classifications are displayed as the appropriate symbol.

Any change to the data model requires the data to be re-processed before the changes are manifested in Prism. The changes for notes data will be seen for new and edited records, and across the catalogue after a full data (re-)upload. Furthermore, the changes for processing updates do not take effect until the release goes live – it will affect updates after that. Therefore you will not be able to see the new notes display in the preview.

Item level notes

Descriptive and General notes from item (i.e.copy) records in your local system are now displayed after the Status in the availability area. The column heading ‘Notes’ only displays when there is a note. This did not require a change to the LDS, so all your Descriptive and General item notes will display now.

Facebook integration

Technically, we have embedded Facebook Open Graph protocol meta tags in Prism, which means that when you implement the Facebook ‘Like’ extension the information from Prism is fully integrated in Facebook, including images.

Feedback spam honeypot

This is intended to trap and discard spam messages generated by automated agents in the Prism feedback form, which have become a nuisance. They tend to fill in every field on the form, so we’ve added a field that’s hidden in the Prism interface but visible to software agents; when a message includes data in that field Prism discards the message.

Performance tweaks

With our approach to continual improvements to the performance of Prism we have made various upgrades to the web server software, delivering incremental performance improvements that add to the responsive feel of Prism and better fit it for future development. We have also been able to adjust the response when no cover image is found so that your browser is more efficient in its use of the Prism servers.

Can’t see the changes?

In a few tenancies some of the changes, such as the Next/Previous buttons, are not displaying. We are working on an update to the release to address this. Meanwhile it can be fixed locally by enabling HTML5 and the Mobile Prism theme. This is done in the Layout Modules area for the relevant tenancy in the Admin Console. It is strongly recommended that you do this in your sandbox tenancy first. Be sure to click ‘Update’ to save the changes and then reset the cache for the tenancy by submitting the URL composed of the base URL followed by /resettenantcache.

Next steps

After a week for you to preview these features, they will be released to the live service during next week. Do make the most of the preview time to try them on your tenancy, and we’d love to hear your feedback. You will also want to ensure that there are no problems with your local styling – there are no changes that should affect styling or extensions in tenancies that adhere to the style guidelines.

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

The latest Prism Development Update webinars took place on Monday 2nd July. We are not able to provide a video of the webinar this time, so here is a summary of the content.

Next/Previous buttons is one of the top voted Prism Ideas, for browsing back and forth in results at the item detail level. We demonstrated the implementation of this feature, which will be in the next release. Preserving the context is crucial and it will do that even when the URL for an item detail page is saved and used again later.

Renewal workflow. We demonstrated a re-designed process for renewing loans to make it quicker, more informative and easier to see the outcomes, for inclusion in the next release. It all happens in the loans page, with the outcome for each loan displayed in context, as well as a summary at the top of the page. The outcome of each renewal action is added into the page without refreshing the whole page, so that it keeps up with you as you quickly renew multiple loans individually. Furthermore, having been clicked, the ‘Renew’ button will be disabled and it will display a relevant, configurable text indicating either success or an exception, until you refresh the page. A single exception message will be displayed even when the system identifies multiple exceptions, selected from a preference order, so that the user is not overloaded with information. We are continuing to refine the display, so the release may differ from the images shown here.

Display of the Reserve button. The top requirement in Prism Ideas is to make the Reserve button context-aware so that it only displays when the item is reservable. This was not quite ready to demonstrate, but most of the work has been done, including a new service in the Local Data Services (LDS) to interrogate your local system. When there are no reservable copies, some configurable text will display instead of the button. When the user is not signed in, this will be done for those items where no copies are reservable by anyone, such as electronic resources and reference material. When the user is signed in the system will take account of the borrower type to suppress the button additionally where there are no reservable copies for that borrower type even though there may be for other borrower types. This will be included in the next release but the LDS upgrade will be required to enable it to work.

Feedback spam honeypot. Tasty as it may sound, this is intended to trap and discard spam messages generated by automated agents in the Prism feedback form, which have become a nuisance. They tend to fill in every field on the form, so we’ll add a field that’s hidden in the Prism interface but visible to software agents; when a message includes data in that field we’ll discard the message. This will be included in the next release.

Notes data. We are re-working notes data in the Prism data model. This will address issues of duplication and ordering of notes. We are also identifying structure, wherever possible, in appropriate kinds of notes, to improve display and indexing; this has been done for contents notes so that Prism can give a more organised and readable dispay, including hierarchical structure in some cases, as well as indexing author and title information appropriately. This will be included in the next release of Prism.

Enhanced enrichments. This development builds on the Notes data work and will follow in the subsequent release. Textual enrichments such as tables of contents and summaries from BDS or your preferred supplier will be included in your catalogue, where they don’t already exist in your bibliographic record. This will include indexing to provide greater discoverability of your resources. Additionally, further types of enrichment will be enabled for display, such as video clips. For the pricing of enhanced enrichment data, please consult your Account Manager.

Performance tweaks. With our approach to continual improvements to the performance of Prism we have made various upgrades to the web server software, delivering incremental performance improvements that will add to the responsive feel of Prism and better fit it for future development. We have also been able to adjust the response when no cover image is found so that your browser is more efficient in its use of the Prism servers.

Reviews. Matt demonstrated the design and workflow for user-contributed reviews. This is work in progress for a later release. Reviews will be listed in a Community contributions panel on the right of the item detail page. The full reviews will be on a separate page. Users will be able to report inappropriate content, as with shared lists. Initially, reviews will not be attributed to their author – this will come in a further development when users will be able to set up their own public profile. To create a review the user will enter a title and review text – both are required, and configurable prompt text can be displayed in the boxes. A ‘preview’ feature will show the user what the review will look like when it is published. Ratings and reviews will be separate, but when both are enabled then the user will be able to rate the item in the same page as entering their review.