I’m pleased to announce that the latest release of Prism is available for you to preview. 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.

 Making the most of your preview

We’ve made technical changes to the way Prism searches and retrieves data. This means it’s important that you make the most of the preview period to ensure your tenancy continues to behave the same as it does with the live version of Prism. As with every release, please also ensure that your local styling and extensions continue to work correctly.

As usual, you can preview this release by inserting ‘/demo/’ after the prism.talis.com part of your URL and before the name of your tenancy, e.g. prism.talis.com/demo/mytenancy/. If you have your own host name, you’ll need to use prism.talis.com instead.

Release to the live service

The date for release to the live service is dependent upon your feedback from preview. This is currently planned for Monday 4th March 2013.

I’m pleased to announce that the preview release of Prism has now been deployed to the live service.  Full details on the inclusions are given in the preview release notice on the Prism blog.

A quick reminder that the new features are ‘More Like this’ and Classification Mark in advanced search. If you’d like to have ‘More Like this’ enabled but haven’t done so yet, please confirm that you’re happy for us to use your  loan data, which will be completely anonymous, in the aggregation for generating suggestions, by emailing libraries-sales@capita.co.uk and we will raise a case for you.

We welcome your comments, questions and ideas on Prism features. You can post comments 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.

I’m pleased to announce that the latest release of Prism is available for you to preview. This includes the ‘More Like This’ service, classification marks in advanced search and some performance tweaks to searches and the ‘All Lists’ page.

Making the most of your preview

These features are now available for you to preview and we urge you to make the most of this period to gain familiarity with the new features and ensure that your tenancy still behaves as expected.

As usual, you can preview this release by inserting ‘/demo/’ after the prism.talis.com part of your URL and before the name of your tenancy, e.g. prism.talis.com/demo/mytenancy/. If you have your own host name, you’ll need to use prism.talis.com instead.

‘More Like This’

‘More Like This’ suggests similar items when a borrower is viewing an item details page. We’ve provided two ways to view the suggestions, a widget at the bottom of the page showing a sliding window of 3 items at a time and a ‘lightbox’, accessible from the left hand menu, that pops up and shows all suggestions.  The mobile interface also has a suitably optimised sliding window widget tailored to the needs of smaller screens.

If you’ve enabled the ratings feature in Prism you’ll notice that, as well as a cover image, title, author and format, we also include the average star rating for the items being suggested.

As discussed in the webinars we’ve partitioned the loan data that powers this service into two pots – one for our academic customers and one for our public customers. The data itself is keyed on standard identifiers such as ISBN, EAN, ISMN and UPC and then intersected with your local holdings so that we only show suggestions that are available in your catalogue. We use the loan data you’ve provided to find items that were borrowed by the same person and use this to build up a list of suggestions; these are ranked in order of similarity to the item being viewed.

If you’ve not had ‘More Like This’ enabled on your tenancy yet you can get a taste of what’s to come by viewing some items in our demonstration tenancy http://prism.talis.com/demo/birmingham/.

Enabling ‘More Like This’ in your catalogue

More Like This is switched off by default and is enabled on request at no charge when you contribute your loan data. We ensure that this has no impact on your operations, and no personal borrower information is shared. The process of copying the data will not require any work from you, or any downtime and all contributed loan history is completely anonymous.

We’ve already had over 50% of our customers agree to include their data, so if you would like to but have not done so yet, please confirm that you are happy for us to use the loan data for recommendations for your institution by emailing libraries-sales@capita.co.uk and we will raise a case for you.

Classification Mark in advanced search

This release also brings an additional option to the More Search Options page, labelled Classification Mark. It provides an explicit way to search by classification number, which has been available since the May 2011 release as an expert search with the qualifier ‘class:’. It searches classifications from your local Work classifications, both main and other, so it covers most or all of the classifications used in your item shelfmarks.

The new element will automatically format the query to make it match the intended classifications and supports both wildcards and Boolean operators to afford flexible combinations, e.g.:

• 511.*
• 511.10 OR 511.11

Useful tips for searching for a classification number, as well as other types of search, can be found in the Expert Search Options documentation in the Prism forum.

Release to the live service

This version of Prism will be released to the live service on 15th January 2013.

Comments and contact

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

I’m pleased to announce that the preview release of Prism has now been deployed to the live service.  Full details on the inclusions are given in the preview release notice on the Prism blog.

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.

I’m pleased to announce that a new version of Prism is available for you to preview. This includes a fix to the Notes display and enables Single Sign On Integration with the Central Authentication Service (CAS) system for customers who have placed an order.

Making the most of your preview

These features are now available for you to preview. We urge you to make the most of the preview period to ensure that Prism continues to work well for your catalogue.

In particular, please check that you can sign in as normal, and that multiple occurrences of notes are displaying.

As usual, you can preview this release by inserting ‘/demo/’ after the prism.talis.com part of your URL and before the name of your tenancy, e.g. http://prism.talis.com/demo/mytenancy/. If you have your own host name, to see the preview you must use prism.talis.com/ instead. The preview 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.

Notes Display issue fix

This fixes an issue where some notes (chiefly from MARC fields 500 and 504) are not displaying when there are multiple notes.

Single Sign On integration with the Central Authentication Service (CAS) system

We have made some changes to the authentication aspects of Prism to allow integration with the Central Authentication Service (CAS) system. We are delighted that this is enabling Prism’s first Single Sign On implementation to go live.

If you have not placed an order for Single Sign On there should be no change when signing in to Prism. During the preview we are advising everyone to check that you can sign in as normal.

For more information about Single Sign On please contact your Account Manager.

Release to the live service

This version of Prism will be released to the live service on Tuesday 18th December.

Comments and contact

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

I’m pleased to announce that a new version of Prism is available for you to preview.

Forgotten PIN link

 The Account log in page now has a link that enables users to reset their PIN if they have an email address registered with the library (in their Alto borrower record). Clicking the link brings up a new page where you type your borrower number and click a Reset PIN link. This sends an email to your registered email address with a link to a web page where you can enter a new PIN and click the Reset PIN button to submit it. Then you can immediately sign in to Prism with your new PIN.

If users don’t have an email address registered with the library then following the Reset PIN feature leads to a page saying ‘Unable to send PIN reset email’. The PIN reset link in the email remains active for ten minutes, after which it goes to a ‘Reset PIN link expired’ page. In that case you can start again.

This feature comes with a default email template, but you can provide your own email text by uploading a file called resetpin.txt and/or resetpin.locale.txt to your tenancy theme in the Admin Console. The resetpin.locale.txt file is for a different interface language, where locale is the locale code, for example resetpin.cy-gb.txt. In these files you can insert the following two tags:

• {{ reset_link }} – mandatory, to give the link to the PIN reset page
• {{ borrower_name }} – optional, allowing you to address the borrower by name, e.g. ‘Dear {{ borrower_name }}, …’.

Pay Now link to pay charges

This requires our ePayments Integration module.

 

When users have charges on their library account and  view them under the Charges tab in Prism, a ‘Pay Now’ button will display. This takes you to the institutional ePayment page and allows you to pay your charges using the payment service provider chosen by your institution. If your library hasn’t got the ePayment module, or you would wish this to be enabled then please contact libraries-sales@captia.co.uk for more details.

Next steps

I’m pleased to announce that the preview release of Prism has now been deployed to the live service.  Full details on the inclusions are given in the preview release notice on the Prism blog.

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.

I’m pleased to announce that a new version of Prism is available for you to preview.

Viewing Everybody’s lists

It’s good to see that libraries are enabling the recent list sharing functionality. It has been found that ‘Everybody’s lists’ does not display as quickly as it should, so we have made a change and it is now much quicker.

Renewal outcomes

We’ve made an adjustment to the re-designed display of renewal outcomes that was welcomed in the previous release. When renewal is disallowed, the explanatory message is now displayed across the bottom of the specific item row(s) rather than being pinned to the top of the browser window. A single alert message is displayed at the top of the page indicating the number of items that failed to renew.

When a renewal action is completely successful (for a single item or ‘Renew All’), no banner message is displayed at the top of the page – success is indicated by the change in the button text and colour.

Contents notes – not available in Preview

We have fixed an issue with the contents notes display, which was omitting some data originating from repeated MARC 505 fields. Although this change is not available in preview (because it requires affected records to be updated, or dummy edited, in live), this new feature will be available once the new changes are rolled out live.

Privacy statement covering EU Cookie Compliance

A privacy statement page is included in this release, covering the collection of personal information and the usage of cookies. During the preview you can see the privacy page in your tenancy at prism.talis.com/demo/{tenancy}/privacy.

We recommend that you update your corporate privacy statement with the details about Prism, and then put a link to it in your Prism footer. This gives you complete control of the privacy statement. Alternatively, you can put a link in your Prism footer to the privacy statement page which is part of Prism; in this case, please remember to omit the ‘/demo’ part of the URL, which should take the form prism.talis.com/{tenancy}/privacy. Also please note that the page at this URL will only be available after release to the live service.

Making the most of your preview

We urge you to make the most of the preview period to explore the changes and to ensure that Prism continues to work well for your catalogue. Please ensure that there are no problems with your local styling; there is nothing in this release that should affect styling or extensions in tenancies that adhere to the Prism design guidelines (pdf), but now is the time to find out if there are any issues, before release to the live service.

We plan to roll these changes out to to the live service on Wednesday 29th August. This provides a longer preview period than usual to provide customers that are on holiday an opportunity to test this new release prior to go live.

As usual, you can preview this release by inserting ‘/demo/’ after the prism.talis.com part of your URL and before the name of your tenancy:  prism.talis.com/demo/{tenancy}/. If you have your own host name, to see the preview you must use prism.talis.com/ instead. The preview 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.

If you have any issues please open a Support case and begin the subject line with ‘Prism Preview’ – this will help us to respond to any queries quickly.

Furthermore, we love to hear 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.

I’m pleased to announce that the recent preview release of Prism has now been deployed to the live service.  For full details on the inclusions please visit the preview release notice.

Additionally, a change to the Admin Console has been released to the live service: in the Community Features area you can now enable Open Graph meta data to support the Facebook ‘Like’ feature and some search engines, and you can optionally set your Facebook app id to override the system default.

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