I’m pleased to announce the release of the latest version of Prism to the live service. This version has been available for preview since 25th July and was described in detail in the preview release notice. The main inclusions are:

– Improved display of formats in initial results display for Semantic Data Model records
– Support for Audio Visual (non-ISBN) cover images
– Addition of two new theme fragments

The improved display of formats is dependent on having implemented the new version of MarcGrab, which is currently being rolled out.

We announced in a  Prism blog post and elsewhere that we have formed an agreement with BDS to provide Prism users with extended enrichments. That is enabled by this release but the switch to BDS will be made separately later. As stated in recent newsletters, please let us know by 15th August if you wish to stay with Nielson Book Data. Please contact your account manager if you wish to discuss Prism enrichments further.

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

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.

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.

It’s great to find what you need in the library catalogue, but it is also important to have services and tools to do useful things with the catalogue data. So I’m happy to announce that the ability to export records to reference management tools and the ability to save records in lists are both features of the latest release of Prism, now available for preview.

The export feature allows you to export to Endnote and RefWorks as well as to export in RIS format, which can be imported automatically by tools such as Reference Manager and Zotero. You can export individual records from either the search results page or the item detail page, and you can also export the contents of a saved list. When in a list, you can also export the data as a comma separated file (csv).

The lists feature allows you to create temporary lists as an anonymous guest user when you’re not signed in to your account, and to create permanent lists when you are signed in. A temporary list automatically becomes a permanent one when you sign in. You can save individual items to a list from either the results page or the item detail page and either add them to an existing list or create a new list by specifying a new list name. To view your lists there is a new ‘My Lists’ link in addition to the user tools links to My Account and Logout. The My Lists link shows the number of lists you have and takes you to a page detailing your lists.

You can see the export and lists features demonstrated in the video of the May Prism Development Update Webinar, starting at about 20 minutes in.

This new release of Prism also includes some other new features.

• Classification search. This is an addition to the Semantic Data Model where your local classifications are identified and indexed. You will need the new MarcGrab to refresh your data to get the benefit of this – we are about to start deploying the new MarcGrab and you are invited to raise a Support case to indicate your requirement for it. Your classifications will be searchable along with all other indexed terms, and you will also be able to target them with an expert search qualifier, ‘class:’, e.g. ‘class:641.5’. This is in addition to the existing qualifier ‘dewey:’ which searches Dewey class numbers from field 082 in the MARC record.

• Identifiers. The Semantic Data Model will now also identify different types of data identifier and make them all searchable: ISBN (already searchable), ISSN, ISMN and EAN. Again, this is dependent on the new MarcGrab. A bug is also fixed where the display of ISBNs was duplicated.

• Statement of Responsibility display. Another addition to the Semantic Data Model, this is also dependent on the new MarcGrab. It will provide the contents of MARC field 245 subfield $c displayed as a note. It will display by default but can be suppressed using styling tools.

• Cover images from Syndetics. This new Prism release includes a plugin to retrieve cover images from Syndetics if you subscribe to them. This can replace the existing Juice-based tool that currently retrieves Syndetics images. If you wish to use this, please raise a Support case.

To access the preview, insert ‘/demo/’ after the prism.talis.com part of your URL and before the name of your tenancy, e.g. http://prism.talis.com/demo/worcestershire/. This 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.

The purpose of the preview is to allow you to explore and become familiar with the new features before they are released to your users, and to ensure that everything is working correctly, particularly in relation to any local styling and other customisations.

All being well we aim to release this version to the live service on 14th June.

If you have questions on this or any other issue, please feel free to email me, terry.willan@capita.co.uk, or your Account Manager, or add a comment on this blog post.

We’re pleased to announce that the recent preview release of Talis Prism 3 has now been deployed to the live service.  For full details on what has changed in this release please visit the preview release notice here: //blogs.librarymanagementcloud.co.uk/prism/2011/02/11/prism-3-release-preview-11-february-2011/.

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.

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve just released the latest version of Talis Prism 3 for everyone to preview. This is a big release with lots of great new features, the most notable are:

• View loan history (beta)
• “My Account” redesign
• Choice of jacket image supplier
• Linked data API
• New breadcrumb trail
• Display of “in transit” items
• An alternative to “no image available”

We’ve also undertaken some “under the bonnet” work to support a lot of exciting developments we’ve got planned for the next year and beyond.

This release also contains some other changes and a small fix:

• Additional fields included on the feedback page
• Year facet is now sorted in descending order
• Fix for a bug in the facet system where values with no corresponding results in a search were being displayed

My Account/View Loan History

The most visible change in this release is the “My Account” redesign that Matt blogged about in December. The new design splits different pieces of data into their own sections and simplifies some of the most common workflows we’ve identified analysing log files. A very common operation is renewing all loans, which is now possible in a single click with the “Renew all” button.

We’ve also looked at the data displayed to users and made a few tweaks, including humanised dates and displaying ILL statuses as text descriptions rather than code numbers.

A new section has been added to allow users to view a history of their past loans; these can be paged through and sorted by title, author or date borrowed. We’ve also added book jackets to serve as a visual “aide memoire” when browsing the list.

Developing Loan History has required a new release of “Local Data Services” (LDS) so we’re going to BETA test it with a handful of customers to ensure everything is working before performing a full rollout. Once the new version of LDS goes to general release and your system is upgraded, Prism 3 will start showing the “Loan History” tab.

Choice of jacket image supplier/Alternative to “no image available”

To increase the coverage for jacket images, we’ve been talking with several providers to augment the current offering. We’re in the final stages of these conversations at the moment and as soon as they are concluded we can enable them with the work we’ve undertaken.

In tandem with this effort, we devoted effort to an idea posted by City of London libraries on Talis Library Ideas: An alternative to the default “No Image Available”. It’s now possible to upload your own images that will be displayed if no cover image can be found. These need to be a particular size and named in a certain way so that we can detect that you’ve uploaded them:

The files should be named

no-image-small.[ext]

and

no-image-medium.[ext]

where [ext] is one of gif, png or jpg, e.g. no-image-small.jpg. We suggest keeping the size of the small image at 75×100 pixels, and the medium at 150×200 pixels.

These files can then be uploaded using the Talis Admin Console.

Linked data API

Allowing greater access to the curated data in your catalogues was a central reason for developing the Linked Data API and with this release you can now surface search results and item pages in a variety of machine-readable formats. The API will also allow richer extensions that are able to tap into more of the underlying data that drives Prism 3.

To view search results as RSS 1.0, you need to add .rss to the end of “/items”, e.g.:

http://prism.talis.com/demo/leicestershire/items.rss?query=Lost+Symbol

Any search can be surfaced in this way, so you could provide RSS feeds of new releases in particular genres; your users can then subscribe to these, allowing them to be informed when something they may be interested in borrowing becomes available.

The RSS icon now also appears in the browser address bar on every search results page; users can click this to capture their search as an RSS feed, allowing them to monitor updates to those results.

The RSS icon in Firefox

The RSS icon in Internet Explorer (lower right hand side of image)

To fetch the details of a particular item in a variety of formats you just append the output type after the local control number, e.g.:

http://prism.talis.com/demo/southwark/items/638126.rdf

The supported output formats are: RDF/XML (.rdf), JSON (.json), N-Triples (.nt) and Turtle (.ttl).

Display of “in transit” items

Another Talis Library Ideas suggestion that we’ve completed for this release is flagging up when an item is in transit/between locations. This feature is also reliant on the new version of LDS, so will also be tested by a small group of libraries before going to general release.

New breadcrumb trail

At a Prism 3 user day last year, the University of Derby mentioned that it would be useful if individual facets could be removed from a search in progress, without having to go back several steps. We set about looking at different ways to present this option to users and settled on a brand new breadcrumb trail for Prism 3.

The new trail has small remove buttons after each element, clicking it will rerun the search without that particular constraint included – allowing users to “open up” their search if they haven’t found exactly what they were looking for.

This is a substantial release so we’d appreciate it if you could take some time to cast an eye over your tenancy and familiarise yourself with the changes we’ve made.

You can access the preview by placing “/demo/” after the prism.talis.com part of your URL, e.g. http://prism.talis.com/demo/leicestershire/.

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

We’re pleased to announce that the recent hotfix release of Prism 3 has now been released to the live service. This resolves an issue in the caching system and enables reset tenant cache to function correctly. An issue that limited numbers of customers experienced with the availability display has also been addressed.

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.

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.