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Enhanced enrichments through Prism 3 webinar

Following a review of the data suppliers earlier this year, a new deal has been agreed with BDS to provide Prism users with extended enrichments. This will mean that Prism will provide the experience that library users have come to expect from today’s digital environment, as well as giving you best value and choice from your Prism subscription.

We held a webinar this week to explain how customers can benefit from these new enrichments and we included a demonstration of how the new book jackets are displayed in Prism searches. You can view a video of the webinar here.

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

Prism Release Preview Update – 27th July 2011

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.

The new Check Availability Button

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.

Admin Console Release – 27th July 2011

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.

Prism Release Preview – July 2011

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

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.

Votes for Prism Ideas

The enthusiastic use made of the Prism Ideas forum by a large proportion of Prism customers is very encouraging and it is proving valuable as  guide to priorities for development. This enthusiasm has also been manifested in feedback on the forum itself, primarily asking for more votes to make it easier to add more ideas. You need a spare vote to be able to add an idea and temporarily borrowing a vote from another idea is a cumbersome process. More votes may also give further discrimination amongst the most popular ideas.

In the light of this feedback and having reviewed the effect of twenty votes in the Alto forum, we have today increased the number of votes that a user can cast in the Prism Ideas forum to twenty.

To date, fifty-eight ideas have been submitted to the Prism forum. We’ve completed eight ideas and another seven are either planned or work has started. When an idea is completed, the votes are returned for re-use.

Fifty-three customers have registered for Prism Ideas and forty-nine have voted. That’s out of fifty-four customers who are live with Prism and around another ten preparing to go live.

We’re spending at least twenty percent of each development period on ideas from the forum, and we’re looking forward to seeing more ideas and clearer trends from the increase in votes.

Information Beautifully Presented – more enrichments to be available in Prism

Following a review of the data suppliers earlier this year, a new deal has been agreed with BDS to provide Prism users with extended enrichments. This will mean that Prism will provide the experience that library users have come to expect from today’s digital environment.

The deal will provide a broader range of enrichments as part of the standard Prism offering. These extended enrichments include jacket cover images for books and AV, tables of contents, track listings and long descriptions for books and AV.

As part of a Prism release later this year, searching the library catalogue through Prism will produce results where the keyword is contained within the enrichments. For example, searching for a song will return CDs which contain the searched song.

The jacket cover images will be available for books and AV shortly. We will let you know when the other enrichments become available in Prism. For more information please contact your Account Manager or libraries-sales@capita.co.uk.

Prism Release – 21 June 2011

I’m pleased to announce that the latest version of Prism has now been released to the live service. It has been available for preview since 27th May.

New features in this release include the ability to create lists of items and to export information to reference management tools such as Endnote, RefWorks and Zotero.

Other features in this release and in the previous release, including Loan History, will become active when you get the new Local Data Services and MarcGrab. A roll out programme to deploy these on request has begun.

For more detail about this Prism release, please see the  preview release notice.

If you have any questions about this release you can comment on this blog, or contact me terry.willan@capita.co.uk or contact your Account Manager.

Prism 3: Development Update Webinar

To keep up to date with the latest Prism 3 Developments you can register for the free webinar on Monday 4th July 2011 at 12:30 for Public Libraries and 14:00 for Academic Libraries

Public libraries click here to register.

Academic libraries click here to register.

This webinar will focus again on discussing the latest Prism 3 developments referring to the Prism 3 Roadmap, while providing an opportunity for you to raise any specific questions that you may have.

In the meantime keep up with the latest Prism 3 news and developments on the Prism 3 website and blog.

Our vision for Prism white paper

We have produced a white paper outlining our vision for Prism. We’d be really interested to hear your feedback on this, and welcome you to post any comments or questions below.

Abstract of the white paper:

“A lot has been written over the last five years about what a “next generation Discovery Interface” should look like. Whilst this is an interesting debate, we believe it’s asking the wrong question. We shouldn’t start from the vague perspective of how a current discovery interface should be improved, but instead focus on the needs of the people and institutions that use the discovery interface.

This is the philosophy we’ve taken during the inception and development of Prism. Wherever possible we’ve looked at empirical data that shows a unique need, looked at emerging market trends and investigated the type of information and data being managed by institutions. Throughout all of this, we’ve built a solid foundation on which to deliver a compelling next generation discovery interface.

Now that this solid foundation has been built, we have been crystallising our plans and ideas for the next phase of Prism’s life cycle.”

Download the full white paper here.

Prism 3: Development Update Webinar

To keep up to date with the latest Prism 3 Developments you can register for the free webinar on Monday 23rd May 2011 at 12:30 for Public Libraries and 14:00 for Academic Libraries

Public libraries click here to register.

Academic libraries click here to register.

This webinar will focus again on discussing the latest Prism 3 developments referring to the Prism 3 Roadmap, while providing an opportunity for you to raise any specific questions that you may have.

In the meantime keep up with the latest Prism 3 news and developments on the Prism 3 website and blog.