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

Reserve button displays only when the item is reservable

This has been the top requirement in Prism Ideas. It has now been implemented in a combination of the Local Data Services and Prism.

When there are no reservable copies a different button  displays with configurable text – the default is ‘Not  Reservable’. When clicked, an information box pops up with  an explanation (this is also configurable text).

When the user is not signed in, this happens for those  items where no copies are reservable by anyone, such as  electronic resources and reference material. When the user  is signed in the system applies further rules to identify  cases where there are no reservable copies for the current borrower type, or the specific borrower has a condition where reservation is denied, such as having reached their reservation limit, or being blocked.

This feature requires an upgrade to the latest version of  the Local Data Services (LDS) which is currently being  rolled out, prioritised by need and request. To register  for your LDS upgrade, please open a support case or contact your account manager.

Next and Previous buttons

These allow browsing back and forth in results quickly at the item detail level. Preserving the context is crucial for this feature and it does that even when the URL for an item detail page is saved and used again later.

Renewal workflow

The re-designed process for renewing loans aims to make it quicker, more informative and easier to see the outcomes. It all happens in the loans page quickly without refreshing the page, temporarily changing the Renew button and displaying a message pinned to the top of the screen to give the outcome for each item. A single exception message is displayed even when the system identifies multiple exceptions, selected from a preference order, so that the user is not overloaded with information.

Notes data

This has been completely re-modelled. Notes data is no longer duplicated and data order is preserved from repeats of the same MARC field. Contents notes are structured and displayed in a more readable way, including a link to view the content in a lightbox pop-up. All standard MARC notes (5XX fields) that are relevant to public display are included. BBFC film classifications are displayed as the appropriate symbol.

Any change to the data model requires the data to be re-processed before the changes are manifested in Prism. The changes for notes data will be seen for new and edited records, and across the catalogue after a full data (re-)upload. Furthermore, the changes for processing updates do not take effect until the release goes live – it will affect updates after that. Therefore you will not be able to see the new notes display in the preview.

Item level notes

Descriptive and General notes from item (i.e.copy) records in your local system are now displayed after the Status in the availability area. The column heading ‘Notes’ only displays when there is a note. This did not require a change to the LDS, so all your Descriptive and General item notes will display now.

Facebook integration

Technically, we have embedded Facebook Open Graph protocol meta tags in Prism, which means that when you implement the Facebook ‘Like’ extension the information from Prism is fully integrated in Facebook, including images.

Feedback spam honeypot

This is intended to trap and discard spam messages generated by automated agents in the Prism feedback form, which have become a nuisance. They tend to fill in every field on the form, so we’ve added a field that’s hidden in the Prism interface but visible to software agents; when a message includes data in that field Prism discards the message.

Performance tweaks

With our approach to continual improvements to the performance of Prism we have made various upgrades to the web server software, delivering incremental performance improvements that add to the responsive feel of Prism and better fit it for future development. We have also been able to adjust the response when no cover image is found so that your browser is more efficient in its use of the Prism servers.

Can’t see the changes?

In a few tenancies some of the changes, such as the Next/Previous buttons, are not displaying. We are working on an update to the release to address this. Meanwhile it can be fixed locally by enabling HTML5 and the Mobile Prism theme. This is done in the Layout Modules area for the relevant tenancy in the Admin Console. It is strongly recommended that you do this in your sandbox tenancy first. Be sure to click ‘Update’ to save the changes and then reset the cache for the tenancy by submitting the URL composed of the base URL followed by /resettenantcache.

Next steps

After a week for you to preview these features, they will be released to the live service during next week. Do make the most of the preview time to try them on your tenancy, and we’d love to hear your feedback. You will also want to ensure that there are no problems with your local styling – there are no changes that should affect styling or extensions in tenancies that adhere to the style guidelines.

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.

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 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.

The list sharing feature is switched off by default so you will need to go into the Admin Console to switch it on and configure your content moderation options. It is strongly recommended that you try this in your sandbox tenancy first.

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

I’m pleased to announce that a new version of Prism is now available for you to preview, and that a new release of the Admin Console is now live.

List sharing

The highlight of this release is the ability to share lists. A currently popular feature with users is the ability to save items to lists for their personal use. Now, subject to library control, a user can choose to make a list discoverable by other people who use the same library catalogue. The list owner, when signed in, can also now add tags and a description to a list, and these are included in the display when the list is shared. The list owner can also change the list title.

It is now possible to re-order items on a list by moving them up or down and there is also a link to check the availability of an item, matching the one in search results.

A user can discover shared lists by selecting My Lists; within the Lists area there is now an option to view ‘Everybody’s lists’, which displays a list of shared lists in descending order of creation date. A user does not need to be signed in to do this. Selecting a tag on any list does a search retrieving those lists with that tag. A user can also select a tag in one of their own lists to view all shared lists with that tag. Selecting a list displays the items on the list as well as the list description and tags.

When viewing a list of shared lists or an individual shared list, there is an option to ‘Flag as inappropriate’; if the user is not signed in then they are invited to do so and they are then brought back to their context to complete the action. This sets an alert to library staff (more on this under the changes to the Admin Console, below) and the user sees a configurable message such as ‘Flagged as inappropriate. Thanks for letting us know.’

When a user wants to see their own saved lists but they are not yet signed in, there is now a link in the My Lists area to ‘Login to access previously saved lists’; after logging in the user is shown their lists rather than being taken to the My Account area.

Lists are not aggregated for display in other catalogues because a list may contain items that are not held in another catalogue.

Admin Console

The new version of the Admin Console, now live, has some additional features to support list sharing and to enable library staff to moderate shared content (list titles, descriptions and tags).

In the existing ‘Community Features’ area:

• there is an additional option to ‘Enable enhanced lists’. When set, this allows users make lists discoverable
• the level of moderation can be set to pre-moderated (the default, requiring approval before content is discoverable by other users), or post-moderated (library staff can still review and moderate shared content but it becomes discoverable as soon as it is shared)
• there is a setting for the number of times a piece of content (i.e. a list) can be flagged as inappropriate before it is automatically blocked (the default is ‘3’)
• you can set an email address to receive notification of additions to the moderation queue.

There is a new area, ‘Content Moderation’ where library staff can review shared content in three categories: Awaiting Moderation, Already Blocked, and Live. Staff can review the content and block or approve it. Content is listed in descending order of date created. An entry can be expanded to review the full user-contributed content and the user barcode is shown. A count is shown for the number of times an item has been flagged as inappropriate. You can click to move the item into either of the other two categories.

Other features

The format ‘Reproduction’ has been demoted in the preference order for selecting the single format to display in a results page entry. This means that those items that have both formats ‘Book’ and ‘Reproduction’ will now display as ‘Book’.

The format ‘Thesis’ now has an entry in the format precedence list so it will now display in results entries.

Next steps

We’re planning on releasing these changes to the live service within the next week. We would appreciate it if you could try these features on your tenancy as we’d love to get feedback on them and you will want to ensure that there are no problems with your local styling. The new features are switched off by default so you will need to go into the Admin Console to switch them on. It is strongly recommended that you do this in your sandbox tenancy first, so that your users do not get the features before you’re ready when we put the Prism release 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, 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.

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.

I’m pleased to announce that a new version of Prism is now available for you to preview, together with a new release of the Admin Console.

Community Collaboration

This Prism release brings the first of the community collaboration features: user contributed star ratings.

The ability to rate an item gives the user a basic level of active participation in the catalogue, allowing them to express their response to an item. The display of ratings in the catalogue serves as a guide to other users in a way that is familiar from many other places on the web.

The average rating is displayed in results and in the item detail page. You can click on it to add your own rating – you are invited to login first, then taken back where you were. On the item detail page you also get a blank set of stars on an item yet to be rated.

Once logged in, ratings can be added on both the results page and the full detail page by clicking on the number of stars you wish to give the item. You can do this whether or not the item has been rated already. Ratings can also be altered if you change your mind at a later date – the new rating replaces an older rating to prevent any one user gaming the system.

We’re aggregating ratings across libraries in two groups: academic libraries and public libraries. All ratings in your library sector will be displayed in your catalogue, giving you the greater scope and refinement of the larger scale. The average rating for an item in a library sector is displayed.

This is just the first part of a larger scheme of work around adding community features to the catalogue which will include enabling users to see and manage their contributed content.

Ratings is an optional feature, allowing you to introduce it when you feel you are ready. We’ve added a new ‘Community Features’ section to the latest release of the Admin Console, also released today, which allows you to turn the feature on or off quickly and easily. To switch on ratings, under Community Features check the Enable ratings box and click the ‘Update’ button. You also need to reset the cache for your tenancy: in a new browser window or tab run your equivalent of this: prism.talis.com/demo/mytenancy-sandbox/resettenantcache.

We always recommend that you do this first for your sandbox tenancy. All Admin Console settings apply to both the preview and live environments, so when this release of Prism goes live, any tenancy where ratings are enabled will have the feature in the live service as well as in the preview.

Electronic Location Links

This release also brings a small change to the data model to improve our handling of Electronic Location and Access (856) fields. We’re ensuring that we extract the relevant information from the field, as well as tidying up how they are displayed on the item details page. This is the first part of a larger theme of work around improving access and discovery of e-resources within Prism.

Admin Console

The new release of the Admin Console brings several key improvements, including faster browsing of files in the theme section. We’ve also taken on board all of the feedback about improving the experience when you just want to upload a single file and have remodelled this section to allow browsing through the folders that make up your theme, with uploads being stored in the folder you have active. Folders are marked as “folder” in the type column and can be navigated to by clicking on their name; a breadcrumb trail is provided to allow you to navigate back up the folder hierarchy. You cannot add or rename folders within the console: the folder structure must be created separately, zipped and uploaded – so if you’d like to add a new folder the best way is to download a theme backup, add the new folder (and files) and then use the upload zip function.

One further new area in the Admin Console is ‘Layout Modules’ allowing HTML5 rendering and the mobile interface to be enabled. If you’d like to enable the mobile interface, both of these need to be checked, but you can also just enable HTML5 if you want to take advantage of more modern web browser features without offering the mobile interface. These are both optional features as they can require a few tweaks to be made to your tenancy theme to ensure your design stays consistent. As with other features you can make adjustments in your sandbox before switching them on in your live tenancy. If you already have the Mobile interface enabled then both will be switched on by default, otherwise both will be switched off.

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 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.

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.

We’re pleased to announce that the recent preview release of Prism 3 has now been deployed to the live service.  For full details on what has changed please visit the preview release notice here: //blogs.librarymanagementcloud.co.uk/prism/2011/11/22/prism-release-preview-%E2%80%93-22-november-2011/.

If you have questions on this, or any other issue, please feel free to email philjohn@capita.co.uk, your account manager, or leave a comment on the blog.

I’m pleased to announce that a new version of Prism is now available for you to preview.  This is a maintenance release addressing a number of issues:

• Disappearing lists
• Blocked borrowers get an error page when they try to sign in. In this release they will get a specific page with configurable text to say that they are blocked from signing in and to ask library staff. The longer term plan for blocked borrowers (i.e. those who have exceeded a limit on fines or overdues)  is to allow them to sign in but to disallow renewal and reservation, with an alert to this in their account.
• Exporting lists as CSV sometimes has wrong data in the ISBN/ISSN column
• Mobile Prism doesn’t switch to landscape on Android HD
• Page navigation from the foot of the page to the next page displays the bottom instead of top of the next page
• The standard number (ISBN/ISSN) of an additional physical form (e.g. electronic version) recorded in MARC field 776 will now be indexed.

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. As usual we strongly recommend that you check the preview of your catalogue carefully to make sure your styling displays as expected, including your Mobile Prism.

If you have any issues or concerns please raise a  Support case. You can also comment on the release by adding a comment on this blog post or emailing me or contacting your Account Manager.

We will release this version to the live service next week. – Update: This is now scheduled for Monday 28th November.

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/examplecat/. 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.

I’m pleased to announce the release of the latest version of Prism to the live service last night. This version has been available for preview since 5th September and was described in detail in the preview release notice. The main inclusions are:

• Prism Mobile Interface, making your Prism catalogue into a mobile ‘web app’, optimised for viewing on all modern smart phones
• Improvements to CSS for themes, optimising performance
• Support for additional LDS authentication methods
• Tiny images on account pages, for more items displayed per screen

The Mobile Interface requires a modification to the tenancy configuration and we recommend you test this on your sandbox tenancy before putting it live. If you raise a service request we will add the configuration to your tenancy as soon as possible.

The improvements to CSS for themes will be switched on together with the Mobile Interface. It is being managed this way because there may be some issues with the display arising from the interaction with your local customised styling. Introducing it on the sandbox tenancy first, together with the Mobile Interface, will allow any such issues to be addressed before putting it live.

You can read much more about the Mobile Interface and the CSS improvements in the posts on Mobile interface configuration and Prism 3 calling: introducing our mobile device interface

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

This post is an addendum to the existing Prism 3 Design Guidelines focusing on the new features that come as part of the mobile interface and its related release.

Enabling the Mobile Interface

Currently, because it requires checks with theme compatibility, mobile is turned on by sending a service request to the Help desk. We will

Turning the interface on by default has two effects: enabling the mobile interface and enabling html5.

Mobile Interface

When enabled, the main effect of the mobile interface is that it will add extra CSS that overrides existing themes when in a mobile context. These changes are adaptive, which means that when you size a modern browser like Chrome or Firefox or IE9 to the targeted window size the mobile interface will come into effect.

Extra features are also enabled such as swipe-based paging and background loading of search results. However, these feature rely on modern HTML5 features that are only available in recent browsers and so may not be present if you view the page on an older desktop browser; Prism will still work as normal though.

Note: Because of the way the mobile interface overrides styles, the system will strip out !important declarations as these may prevent those overrides.

HTML5

The Prism mobile interface makes use of a number of features from the new version of HTML (the markup language of the web). Since we’re using these modern features, we’ll switch the DOCTYPE to indicate HTML5.

This has the additional bonus of forcing Internet Explorer 6 to use its standards rendering mode, which means it behaves more like modern browsers. This may mean you find themes designed assuming IE6 quirks mode may look odd. Fortunately the new release also has some additional features designed to help targeting older versions of Internet Explorer, see CSS Browser Targeting below, allowing much easier targeting of corrective measures.

Customising the Mobile Interface

The mobile interface is a series of additional stylesheets and behaviours for small devices. It aims for a more “app-like” feel, which focuses on core tasks and their requisite elements of the interface, often hiding extra detail behind reveals to optimise for the small screen size.

Because mobile is a more fragmented space than desktop, where slight changes can have major impacts you might not see on one particular phone, the mobile interface has a more restricted set of configuration options. This makes the theme more reliable across devices and enables us to fix in one place rather than across multiple tenancies.

Configuration is achieved by creating a file called config.ini that you upload as part of your theme files via the admin console. It goes in the base of the theme so you can update it as a single file without re-uploading the entire theme. Rather than write CSS rules it allows you to specify parameters that we turn into CSS for you. This means you don’t have to worry about browser inconsistencies, since we handle that for you.

A config.ini looks like this (note lines may wrap and {tenancy} should be replaced with your tenancy):

;this is a comment...
 [Mobile]

touch_icon = //prism.talis.com/{tenancy}/assets/-/images/start_icon.png

mobile_header_background = //prism.talis.com/{tenancy}/assets/-/assets/images/mobile_header.png

mobile_form_element_border = #E3E5F5
mobile_form_element_background = #fff
mobile_form_button_background = #fafafa

mobile_tag_background = #D2E3FF
mobile_tag_border = #80B2FF
mobile_tag_text_colour = #333

mobile_text_colour = #222
mobile_link_colour = #28489D

You can create this file in Notepad or any other text editor, simply make sure it is saved with the .ini extension. The initial set of configurable parameters is conservative and allows for form element styling, facet/tag styling and main text colouration. It also allows you to specify the background image for the application title and the touch icon used when creating a shortcut icon on iPhone/iPad.

The web addresses for these image should be full urls, with a protocol independent uri so they work under both secure and insecure connections. Note the lack of http: prefixing the web addresses used, for example:

//prism.talis.com/{tenancy}/assets/-/images/start_icon.png

The sizes for iOS start icons are 57×57 pixels. You can learn more about these on Apple’s Developer Site.

You may also want to specify a custom background for the application header. This sits at the top of all pages in the mobile interface behind the main application title. It should be 50px high, by a maximum of 470px wide. Note that the 470px is a maximum and that the image will be truncated on smaller screens. Also note that the icon shown by default is 40px by 40px, so if you want to substitute in your own this is the size to use.

Extra Links

Mobile hides header and footer fragment detail to save space and focus on the core functionality. There may be items, such as links to terms and conditions, that you are required to include a link to and wish to re-instate on mobile. Be cautious of what you choose to add, since it is far easier to overload the interface on a mobile device than on a desktop.

The best option for adding such extra links is to add this to the headerlinks.html fragment as a menu item, giving it the class of mobile. This will hide it on desktop devices, but place it in the openable menu on the top of the screen should access be needed:

For example:

<ul>
    <li class="mobile"><a href="{url}mobilehelp.html">Mobile Help</a></li>
</ul>

Javascript Extensions

If you make use of any extensions to the Prism interface, image carousels or similar via either Juice or jQuery, you may wish to disable these when mobile is enabled as they may cause slowness due to extra network requests and more involved scripting.

You can set these to not run when mobile is enabled by checking the PRISM.mobile object property in Javascript. This is set to true when the main window is smaller than the 480px that triggers the mobile interface. You can then turn of features that aren’t suitable to run in a mobile context.

if(PRISM.mobile){
 //code to run mobile essential extensions
 }
 else{
 //code to run normally
 }

You could also modify how Juice is included in the page to use this too, reducing your downloads on mobile devices even further. So for example, the following could be added to your javascript.html fragment:

<script type="text/javascript">
    $(function(){
        if(!PRISM.mobile){
                $('body').append('<script type="text/javascript" src="http://prism.talis.com/{tenancy-name}/assets/-/juice.js"></script>');
            }
    })
</script>

This would only include the juice.js file if mobile is not enabled.

If you are using extensions, we recommend you move to using the version of jQuery bundled with Prism, to avoid downloading the same library multiple times.

Additional Features

The release with mobile also includes a number of additional features that improve the handling of CSS.

CSS browser targeting

The new release includes a more robust method of targeting older versions of Internet Explorer with CSS rules to account for browser quirks. By prefixing a CSS selector with a particular class you can target older versions of the browser with specific fixes. For example:

 .item{
 width:98%;
 }

.ie6 .item{
 width:100%;
 }

would declare a normal width on newer browsers of 98%, but force IE6 to set the width to 100%. This method prevents the use of ugly and problematic “CSS hacks” that can cause unexpected behaviour.

CSS Merging

The new CSS handler features a number of improvements to the way CSS is served to the browser.

Firstly we merge the files together, reducing network requests. Where previously we linked to three files base.css, site.css and print.css, these files are now wrapped together as one, with the mobile interface included as well if enabled. This merged file has a url of assets/{etag}/merged.css , which means it looks like it’s in your theme so existing image references work.

When this file is served it is sent with far future expiring cache headers which means that the file will always be cached, reducing requests for large CSS files and speeding your catalogues display. If you change your site.css or config.ini, or we release a new version of Prism, the file’s web address changes automatically so the updated CSS will be downloaded.

Note: Because we now merge CSS, if your theme uses @import rules, which must appear at the top of the file to work. These will now need to be actually included in the site.css file. This is best practice as it allows us to reduce network requests and force caching.

Interface Labels

Mobile makes use of several interface labels that have previously been hidden (the main application title) or are new (mobile introductory text). These can be customised as with any interface label in Prism. The default for application title is “Talis Prism”, but you may prefer a shorted version of your institution name with “Library Catalogue” added. Please raise a service request with the required text and we will configure it for you.

We’re pleased to announce that the latest version of Prism is now available to preview.

Mobile Interface Enhancements

The main feature in this release is the Prism Mobile Interface. This makes your Prism-based catalogue into a mobile “web app”, optimised for viewing on all modern smart phones (iPhone, Android and others). We’re really pleased with the way this has turned out and think it will be a valuable feature for an increasingly mobile user base.

The mobile interface enables an adaptive design that triggers when a small-screen device accesses the page and reformats the page to be more mobile friendly. This feature also includes a huge number of improvements to speeding up access over slower mobile networks using browser-side caching.

Enhancements include:

• Enhanced theme display on mobile devices
• Background loading of search results for speedier paging and fewer requests
• Browser-side caching of search results for faster repeat viewing
• Swipe gestures can be used to page searches results on touch-enabled devices
• Home screen icon for iOS

More about these enhancements was covered in the recent mobile interface webinar.

The mobile interface itself requires a modification to the tenancy configuration and we recommend you test this on your sandbox tenancy before going live. If you raise a service request we will add the configuration as soon as possible and let you know when it’s available.

Some features use interface fragments that were previously hidden (the default application title is Talis Prism for example) and you may wish to add these requests to the same service request.

Improvements to CSS for Themes

In addition to the mobile work the release also includes a vast array of performance optimisations for themes by updating the CSS:

• All CSS merged into one file for faster delivery
• Better caching of CSS
• New features for targeting older Internet Explorer browsers
• Improved Print stylesheets
• Additional CSS hooks on the advanced search page  for easier styling

Along with details about how to customise the mobile theme, we’ll include details about these improvements in an upcoming blog post and revised version of the Design Guidelines.

Because there are so many changes behind the scenes we strongly recommend that everyone checks the preview of their catalogue carefully to make sure themes display as expected. We’ll leave this version on preview for two weeks to ensure there’s time to catch any oddities.

Support for Additional LDS Authentication Methods

This release also includes additional features allowing for future development of expanded authentication methods.

Tiny Images on account pages

Our new jacket enrichments allows much more flexibility in terms of image sizes available. We’ve turned on the additional tiny image size in places  where it is more appropriate than the default small image.

Previewing this new version in your catalogue

As usual, this version of Prism can be accessed by including /demo/ before the tenancy part of your url, so for example http://prism.talis.com/demo/southwark for Southwark’s catalogue. If you are testing the mobile interface we will add that to your sandbox tenancy first and will contact you when it is enabled with further details.

I’m pleased to announce that the upgrade to BDS cover images is now live as the default in Prism catalogues. Today’s switch to BDS was enabled in the latest release of Prism last week and is the first step in implementing an agreement with BDS to provide Prism users with extended enrichments.

Details of the agreement for enhanced enrichments from BDS  were given in a webinar last month which is available as a video.

BDS images are now provided by default but you can opt for an alternative supplier.

With the switch to BDS you will see
– more cover images for books
– cover images for audio and video resources where your record includes the International Article Number (EAN) or Universal Product Code (UPC). This gives considerable extra scope to the coverage of images in your catalogue.

The BDS images are generally larger, giving greater clarity and detail, because the width is fixed to fill the space available, whereas previously the longest edge was a fixed length.

Some good examples of the extra coverage in Southwark Libraries’ catalogue:
– New acquisitions in the Music Catalogue
– New acquisitions in the Film Catalogue
– Lord of the rings (books, CD, Blu-ray …)

Smaller images will be coming in a future release for the mobile interface and for lists in the My Account area.