We’re pleased to announce that the latest release of Prism is available for you to preview. This release includes a new search builder to replace advanced search, user contributed tags,  borrower notification preferences, and several other features.

Search builder replacing advanced search
Advanced search is little used in Prism or in other systems. This new feature offers a more integrated and engaging approach. The ‘More search options’ link is replaced by ‘Build Search’, giving the user a simple dialogue in the same place as the search box. Brief guidance text appears as the user selects options.

The user sees the query being built in the search box, allowing them to learn and be able to use  expert query techniques in future.

Tags
The Community Contributions panel on the Item Detail page, which details lists that the item is on, now also includes tags contributed by users within your library service. You can click on a tag to retrieve items with that tag. A link allows the user to log in to add tags or change their existing tags for the item.

On the Community Features page of the recently released update to the Admin Console there is an ‘Enable tags’ option allowing you to configure this feature on or off (the default is off), and a new moderation area allows you to moderate users’ tags in the same way as you can moderate lists. Your existing moderation settings apply to both lists and tags.

Borrower notifications
A new tab, ‘Contact options’, in the My Account area allows the user to view and amend the methods of communication that they are happy for the library to use to send them notifications and whether they consent to receiving updates on library news and events. The options they can see are dependent on options being enabled in new configuration settings in SetConfig in Alto 5.5. For security, the new tab will only display if you require users to enter a PIN to log in.

This feature will become available when you have completed the full upgrade to Alto 5.5.  This release of Alto is currently in beta test and is expected to go on general release this month.

Relator terms and Series number handling
Relator terms as additions to names are now common in RDA cataloguing. In this release Prism excludes the relator term from author facets and from Find more by Author. This means that, in those places, two occurrences of a name, with and without a relator term in the MARC record, are treated as the same name in a single entry.

In Find more by Series the series already displays correctly without the volume number of the item within the series, and it retrieves all items in that series. In this release the volume number is reinstated for display in descriptive areas and for indexing to allow search for an item by series including the volume number.

You’ll see these changes as you process updates after the release has gone live.

Domain migration re-direct
In connection with the Prism domain Name Transition from the old domain name prism.talis.com to the new domain name capitadiscovery.co.uk this release gives us the ability to activate the ‘noisy’ re-direct that briefly displays a message advising the user to update their bookmarks before it continues to the new domain.

Login form validation
When the user tries to log in without completing the login form, rather than telling them that their credentials were not recognised it displays an appropriate prompt alerting the user to the fields they need to complete.

Restrict features to specific IP addresses
This feature provides the IP address of the user in a way that allows you to use it in JavaScript to provide functionality for specific locations such as OPACs in the library. For example, you could make the account timeout apply only to library OPACs.

Contents notes display fix
This fixes an issue where contents notes were not displaying when each element of the contents was in a separate MARC field. These now display correctly.

You’ll see this change as you process updates after the release has gone live.

ILL workflow
This Prism Pro feature provides integrated inter-library loan requesting, including searching various sources for bibliographic details and automatically creating a pending ILL request in the LMS for staff to check and authorise. Initially it is being enabled for a development partner. For more details please ask your Account Manager or email libraries-sales@capita.co.uk.

Lists fixes
This release fixes issues with  list contents sometimes not displaying, related to the old and new Prism domains.

Other features

• The links to items in moderation emails now use the new domain
• My Account pages always use https

Making the most of your preview
This release is now available for you to preview. Please do make the most of this opportunity to gain familiarity with the new features and ensure that your tenancy still behaves as expected.

As the release includes CSS and JavaScript changes for Build Search, your Prism styling may have been impacted. If you identify any issues with your styling please raise a Support case.

As with every release, please also ensure that your extensions continue to work correctly.

To preview this release, please precede your tenancy URL at the new domain name with ‘demo.’, like this: demo.capitadiscovery.co.uk/{your tenancy name}. If you have your own host name, you’ll need to use demo.capitadiscovery.co.uk instead.

Release to the live service
(Statement updated 20th September 2013). An update to the preview will be released on Monday 23rd September to include a revised Help page and to fix an issue with the horizontal positioning of the Build Search overlay in Internet Explorer 8 and older.

We expect to complete the work supporting you with amendments to your themes early next week.

The release to the live service will be on Thursday 26th September.

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

We’re pleased to announce that a new release of the Admin Console is now live. This release enables the beta of Alto Borrower Notifications (Alto 5.5) and the admin aspects of the forthcoming tags feature that is in the next release of Prism.

When you sign in to the Admin Console and select one of your Prism tenancies you will see a change in the contents menu: the ‘User Content Moderation’ link has become two links, one to the existing Moderation area for Lists, and the other to a new Moderation area for Tags.

In the Community Features area there is a new check box ‘Enable tags’, which is unchecked by default. Checking this box will allow users to add, change and browse tags when the forthcoming version of Prism is released (you will be able to try it in the preview).

The Moderation area for Tags works in the same way as the one for Lists. There is an ‘Awaiting Moderation’ queue where tags are held for your approval when you have the Moderation Level set to ‘Pre-moderated’; an ‘Already Blocked’ list for tags you have blocked; and the Live list of approved tags (with the Post-Moderation level set, tags go straight to Live).

The next release of Prism with the Tags feature (and other features) is due to be released to preview next week – we’ll announce it here as usual.

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

If you were unable to attend one of our recent Prism 3 update webinars, then catch up on latest developments by watching the recording below or by downloading the video.

Agenda

• Prism Roadmap run-through
• Latest release
  • Augmented discovery live
• Next release
  • Login form validation
  • Tags
  • Query builder replacing advanced search
  • IP address-related features such as timeout
  • Relator terms and Series number handling
  • Domain migration redirect
  • Lists fixes
  • Advanced ILL workflow
  • Borrower notification preferences
  • Twitter card: Prism content in Tweets
• Local Data Services upgrade reminder
• Roadmap/next steps
  • Augmented discovery implementations
  • Migrations
  • Take the tour
  • Did you mean
  • Reviews

[podcast format=”video”]https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/clms-website/prism_webinar_300713.mp4[/podcast]

I’m pleased to announce that the version of Prism that has been in preview since 4th July has now been deployed to the live service. Details of the inclusions are given in the preview release notice. In another post you can also find more information on the integration with the EBSCO Discovery Service.

We welcome 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.

EDS Integration

We have recently released a new feature in Prism for libraries that use EBSCO data via EDS (EBSCO Discovery Service). The integration allows your users to search the EDS data from within the Prism search interface, by allowing users to select the resource they’d like to search:

Your users can then easily navigate around a whole host of resources from one place. For those of you who have been using the Connect for EBSCO licence for a while (which allows Prism data to be surfaced in EDS), all you need do is contact us to take advantage of this additional integration, as there is no additional charge. Please raise a support call to ask us to enable this: libraries-support@capita.co.uk

A search of the library catalogue

The same query searching EDS

This type of integration will be the same for CALM and any other external data sets you would like us to integrate with.

If you don’t already have the Connect for EBSCO licence, please contact libraries-sales@capita.co.uk.

I’m pleased to announce that the latest release of Prism is available for you to preview. This release includes Augmented Discovery – EBSCO, and search by Unique Identifier.

Augmented Discovery – EBSCO

If you subscribe to electronic resources via EBSCO, we can configure Prism so that your users can choose to search your resources as indexed in the EBSCO Discovery Service, or to search your local catalogue as now. If you would wish to have this enabled or if you have any questions regarding this, please contact your Account Manager or email, libraries-sales@capita.co.uk.

Search by Unique Identifier

For exact access to a particular item a new search qualifier ‘uid:’ will allow you to search with the unique identifier of an item using a query like ‘uid:123456’. This will make it easier for library staff to look up a known item (currently you can start with another item and change the identifier in the URI). This feature also serves library staff using Soprano, since item search in Soprano uses the Prism search system.

To preview this release

To preview this release, please precede your tenancy URL at the new domain name with ‘demo.’, so: demo.capitadiscovery.co.uk/{your tenancy name}. If you have your own host name, you’ll need to use demo.capitadiscovery.co.uk instead.

Release to the live service

This version of Prism will be released to the live service on Tuesday 9^th July 2013. It is a short period in preview because for most libraries the impact of change is minimal (the addition of search by unique identifier), and because augmented discovery – EBSCO has been reviewed already by the initial implementers. It also allows us to move on more quickly towards release of a number of further developments.

Comments and contact

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

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.

Following on from our post on the 8th May I thought it would be useful to give an update on the Platform Migration project.

We are now more than half way through the migration with 54 customers using the Capita Platform. We continue to be on schedule to migrate all of our customers across by the end of July.

If you are keen to be moved over the next month please let us know by raising a support case or emailing the team libraries-support@capita.co.uk and we will be in contact soon.

Benefits of the new platform have now been posted to the Prism Forum and can be accessed here

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please contact us at libraries-support@capita.co.uk.

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 the preview release of Prism has now been deployed to the live service. As described in the preview release notice, this is an infrastructure release with changes to the Prism infrastructure in order to support the delivery of the roadmap items ‘Migration to the Capita Infrastructure’ and ‘Migration to a new domain name’, which are due during 2013.

We welcome 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.