The recent Prism 3 release to demo has now been released to the Live Prism 3 environment. For further details please click here.

Keep up with the latest Talis Prism 3 news and developments on the Talis Prism 3 website and blog.

We’ve just released the latest version of Talis Prism 3 for customers to preview; this version fixes the following issues:

• “Back to search results” not working after clicking availability link on item page
• Question mark causing search to fail

We’ve also completed the work to display all notes on the item details page, as discussed on the blog post back in January (//blogs.librarymanagementcloud.co.uk/prism/2010/01/19/display-of-notes/).

Finally, a small tidy up has been put in place so that old item URL’s (/renderitem.php?item=123456) get silently redirected to the new form (/items/123456).

To view these changes before they are rolled out to the live service simply add “demo/” after http://prism.talis.com/, but before your tenant name (e.g. Leicestershire Library Services will access their preview at http://prism.talis.com/demo/leicestershire/).

If you have any queries about this release, or have any issues you want raised before we release to live on 16 March, then please raise a support call, contact your account manager or alternatively email Alison Kershaw.

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.

We have a question about the way we handle notes that we would like your help with – how notes display in Prism 3.

We’ve been looking at this because a few customers have asked for more of their notes to display on the item detail pages in Prism 3. At the moment only one note from the marc record is shown and it’s not predictable which one will be shown.

The reason notes don’t work well today is that the underlying data model for notes was designed for indexing and didn’t consider the needs of displaying notes properly. All notes from 500, 501, 502, 504, 505, 508, 511, 518, 520, 521, 533, 534, 536, 538, 545 and 550 are kept and indexed for search, unfortunately they are not kept in distinct properties and the order in which they were present in the marc record is not preserved.

In the Semantic Data Model work we have already designed new data structures for notes that will keep them distinct and maintain the ordering from the catalogue record – so longer term we will be addressing this issue much more cleanly.

What some of you have asked us to do in the meantime is to display all of the notes we have stored for indexing. This would display more of your valuable information to the user, helping them understand more about the item they’re looking at. On the downside, because of the limits of the data model, the order in which the notes are displayed would not be predictable and some notes such as the Summary, Contents and Performers notes may be repeated in the display.

We’ll be discussing this at the development webinar today and would very much like to hear your views on what is most preferable – more data, but with some repetition, or showing only one note as we do today. You can add a comment to this post, email terry.willan@talis.com, or bring your views to the development webinar.

To help you see what we mean we’ve put together some example screens showing how the notes would display. Click on each screenshot for a larger view of it.

• Catch-22 (with publication history, summary and indexes notes)
  
• Songs of Scotland (with contents and performers notes
  
• Language proof and logic (with contents, accompanying material, indexes and system requirements notes)
  

The recent Prism 3 release to demo has now been released to the Live Prism 3 environment. For further details please click here.

Keep up with the latest Talis Prism 3 news and developments on the Talis Prism 3 website and blog.

We released changes to Prism 3 to the demo service yesterday evening. These changes cover a number of enhancements.

We have changed the cache settings for theme assets such as CSS. Browsers are now encouraged to cache these, improving the load times for Prism pages.

We have also fixed an annoying bug with the display of some UTF-8 characters in the item details pages where some UTF-8 characters were not displayed.

There have also been internal changes to the way we generate HTML. These changes improve the maintainability of our code without changing the functionality of Prism 3.

If you have any questions about the release or wish to raise issues before the release to live on 9 December then please raise a support call, contact your account manager or email Alison Kershaw.

To keep up to date with the latest Talis Prism 3 news and announcements please watch the Talis Prism 3 Microsite for details of the next Talis Prism 3 Development Update webinar which will be in January.

A milestone for Talis Prism 3 has been passed today with this release;  the live service is now being managed through the new administration interface.

Before we release the new administration interface to you, we are using it to make changes on your behalf enabling us to ensure usability.

If you would like any changes made to your Talis Prism 3 catalogue in the meantime, then please raise these to either your Talis Prism 3 Implementation Consultant or Alison Kershaw.

To keep up to date with the latest Talis Prism 3 news and announcements please visit the Talis Prism 3 Microsite and register for the next Talis Prism 3 Development Update webinar.

This release, now available for preview, enables Talis Prism 3 to be managed through the new administration interface, which Talis is now using to manage Talis Prism 3 catalogues on behalf of customers. This is the final testing that Talis has scheduled before looking to release the administration interface for beta testing by customers.

If you would like any changes made to your Talis Prism 3 catalogue in the meantime, then please raise these to either your Talis Prism 3 Implementation Consultant or Alison Kershaw.

To keep up to date with the latest Talis Prism 3 news and announcements please visit the Talis Prism 3 Microsite.

Please send any feedback on this preview to Alison Kershaw.

The latest release of Talis Prism 3 has focused on two areas:

The start in the improvements to the search performance that Talis have planned, and the re-organisation of the way the data for the interface language is managed; this is a first step towards delivering the fruits of the work we have been doing on administration for Talis Prism.

The Talis Prism 3 Development Update Webinar on 9^th September will look to explain the Administration Interface in further detail, to register for this webinar please email Alison Kershaw.

Customers with Talis Prism 3 are now able to try out this new release in preview, as usual, with a fully functioning view of their own catalogue and data but using this new version of the software.

Release to the live service of this work is scheduled for Wednesday 2nd September, but please send any feedback on this preview to Alison Kershaw.

To keep up to date with the latest Talis Prism 3 news and announcements please visit the Talis Prism 3 Microsite.