For those who have started their Talis Prism 3 implementation, join us at the Talis offices for a free Talis Prism User Day on 18 March 2010. Share your experiences with other Prism 3 users, see the latest development roadmap and feed your thoughts into the future of our development plans. Register your free place at Prism events page.
The eagle-eyed amongst you spotted that we made some changes very early this year, but that we didn’t publish a release notice. So here’s me coming clean on our early January release.
We released a number of under-the-bonnet changes on 6 January, this was a maintenance release to do some internal improvements and also to trial some new functionality with one of our academic customers.
A few months back the academic libraries told us how important it would be for them to have the same View My Account sign-in links from their portal that they currently have in Prism 2. We blogged about Portal Single Sign-On after that webinar and committed to getting something in place for now. This release includes the necessary pieces in Prism 3 to allow single sign-on links in the portal to be re-configured for Prism 3. We’re testing that with one of our large academics right now and will be able to make that available to everyone soon. If you are an academic library who wants to go live with Prism 3 now that portal sign-on links are available, please let your account manager know.
Another important feature for several of you out there is the ability to configure the search sort ordering. This release includes the ability to configure the sort drop down according to your own needs. We’ve configured all of you with the original out-of-the-box settings for Prism 3, so nothing has changed in your tenancies and we have been testing a different set of options with one of our academic customers. At the moment this is only configurable by the development team, not via the admin interface, so we have limited capacity to make these changes right now. If you have an immediate need to alter your sort options then please log a support call for the change.
Under the bonnet we also made some improvements in the way we handle page rendering, this was to reduce load on our servers, allowing more customers to go live and keeping the costs of running the service down. This improvement has also made a small difference to page load times across Prism 3.
If you have any questions on this or other issues feel free to email me Alison.Kershaw@talis.com or your account manager. Or comment here, of course.
Having used the Google Analytics (GA) application in conjunction with Talis Prism 3 (and Engage) for some time, we asked two of our customers what they thought of the application and what information from GA was being collected and used on a regular basis.
The dashboard view is certainly something that featured highly in the feedback – particularly its ability to show trends across a variety of options, allowing easier monitoring of developments such as increased usage of ipod/iphone. As Christine Smith, Collection Development Manager, University of Bolton said “The general dashboard information is used quite a bit to show trends – and always impresses senior managers.”
Other information regularly collected includes:
Below are three screenshots showing the different pieces of information that are readily accessible using Google Analytics. Clicking on any of the screenshots will open up a larger image which will enable you to see the details of the report more easily.
This first screenshot shows a typical dashboard view, based on our demonstration tenancy, Broadminster, giving a high level overview of items such as the number of visits to the tenancy, the sources of the traffic and a map showing where the visitors are from.
This second screenshot delves deeper into the visitor data and shows the number of people visiting the site over the given time period, how many pages were viewed, and the average amount of time spent on the site. This report also shows which browsers people have used to access the site and a list of the various connection speeds.
The third screenshot looks specifically at search terms and details information about the most popular search terms.
However, the reports are not limited to just these factors. If the information is recorded, then it can be reported on.
In summary, using the feedback from Mary King, Applications Manager (Library Systems), Southwark Council “To be honest if you have the time you can pull all sorts of really interesting, useful and quirky info from analytics, we love it here. We have much better access to a much wider range of stats, presented in a range of user friendly formats. If we had time and resources (I) am sure there is lots more we could be doing but for the moment it makes it much easier to track usage and identify trends.”
Talis Training is also currently working on a training session looking at using Google Analytics to monitor the usage of your Talis Prism 3 tenancy. Further information about this will follow.
In the meantime, if you would like any further information or to discuss the implementation of Google Analytics within your tenancy, please contact your Account Manager or email training@talis.com
During December we saw 1,970,154 searches being carried out in Talis Prism 3. Although this figure is lower then November most universities are closed from mid December onwards, and public libraries also close for several days.
We look forward to seeing an increase in January when we are expecting more libraries to launch Talis Prism 3.
If you have any queries about this or any other aspect of Talis Prism 3, please contact your Account Manager or email Alison Kershaw on alison.kershaw@talis.com
Following on from my previous post New Year New Catalogue, I am pleased to announce that Haringey Libraries have launched Talis Prism 3 to the public. The new catalogue which can be seen here was designed by the Talis Design team working closely with Haringey Libraries.
A URL redirect has been setup so that users can continue to use their existing bookmark, which is then redirected to the new catalogue.
If you have any queries about this or any other aspect of Talis Prism 3, please contact your Account Manager or email Alison Kershaw on alison.kershaw@talis.com.
January 2010 is looking to be an exciting time for the launch of several Prism 3 catalogues. Following on from the 12 customers who went live with Prism 3 in 2009, a further 4 customers are looking to launch Prism 3 in early January. This includes Leeds Libraries, Liverpool Libraries, Haringey Libraries and Leicestershire Libraries.
We are also working with several other libraries that are also looking to launch Prism 3 early in the New Year.
If you have any queries about this or any other aspect of Talis Prism 3, please contact your Account Manager or email Alison Kershaw on alison.kershaw@talis.com.
In November we saw 2,769,129 searches being carried out in Talis Prism 3.
If you have any queries about this or any other aspect of Talis Prism 3, please contact your Account Manager or email Alison Kershaw on alison.kershaw@talis.com.
To keep up to date with the latest Talis Prism 3 Developments you can register for the webinar on Tuesday 19 January 2010.
Academic libraries click here to register.
Public libraries click here to register.
This webinar will focus again on discussing the latest Talis Prism 3 developments referring to the Talis 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 Talis Prism 3 news and developments on the Talis Prism 3 website and blog.
As detailed in the blog posting of 5th November, this is to advise that the Talis Administration console introductory video is now live on the Talis Prism 3 website and can be accessed via this link
We have also created a guide to using the console which can be accessed here
http://www.talis.com/prism/docs/talis_admin_console.pdf
or can be found in the Talis Prism Support area.
If you have any queries about this or any other aspect of Talis Prism 3, please contact your Account Manager or email Alison Kershaw on alison.kershaw@talis.com
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