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).

To keep up to date with the latest Talis Prism 3 Developments you can register for the free webinar on Monday 7th February 2011 at 12:30 for Public Libraries and 14:00 for Academic Libraries

Public libraries click here to register.

Academic libraries click here to register.

This webinar will focus again on discussing the latest Talis Prism 3 developments referring to the Talis Prism 3 Roadmap, while providing an opportunity for you to raise any specific questions that you may have.

In the meantime keep up with the latest Talis Prism 3 news and developments on the Talis Prism 3 website and blog.

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. The main topics covered were:

• Introductions
• Roadmap
• General Update
  • Next release:
  • Admin Console
  • Talis Library Ideas
  • SDM
  • Roadmap next steps
    • 20% Dev time for ideas forum ideas
    • Planning for “augmented discovery”
    • Improvements to advanced search
    • Questions

The next webinar will be on Monday 23rd August, details will be posted on the Talis Prism blog shortly.

[podcast format=”video”]http://talis-videos.s3.amazonaws.com/prism_webinar_120710.mp4[/podcast]

You’ve heard us talking a lot about the Semantic Data Model (I provided a brief summary during the last Webinar, and it’s been covered in some detail on the blog posting back in January). What is it going to mean over the next few months for your Prism 3 catalogue though?

The need to move away from a field based record representation to one made up of links between different entities is very important for improving the user experience in Prism 3. Moving towards a linked data model gives us several benefits:

• your catalogue will become more browsable through the introduction of dedicated pages for authors, subjects, artists, and more
• Prism 3 will also function as an API, allowing other applications or your extensions to tap into and use your data in new ways
• we can weave information from other sources into the item display, augmenting the excellent data already present in your catalogue.

The most important thing to note is that we aren’t “going dark” for an extended period, to emerge with the new data model as a finished item; we’re going to be tackling the task in a series of small, gradual steps. Throughout the next two quarters we’re aiming to provide regular releases when we finish each section, adding value straight away. The first area of data that we’re tackling is format.

Format

The MARC 21 specification offers a rich framework for describing the format of resources that we can mine to get better context for the items in your catalogue; this also underpins other work we want to implement, such as tailoring display of items to the demands of their media; by identifying “what” an item is, we can display context-sensitive enrichment. With CDs this could mean showing track listings fetched from MusicBrainz, and perhaps a short audio preview; with books, a synopsis would be more suitable (from the MARC record, or fetched from an external resource such as LibraryThing); for films, cast and production lists.

In the work on format, we’re modelling both the form of content, such as dictionary, thesis, film, or poetry, and the carrier format such as Large print, CD or DVD. The model will enable the display of meaningful and specific terms to users in both descriptions and navigation options, such as E-book, DVD, VHS and Blu-ray.

This is dependent on the data, of course. Format information will be extracted from all the relevant standard places in your MARC records and mapped into the data model. Some of the key parts of the MARC record for this include the Type of record and the Bibliographic level (Leader/06 and 07), control fields 007, 008 and 006, as well as data fields such as 300 and some notes.

Books

If an item is classed as a book, the most important field we’ll be looking at is 008. We’ll look at form of item (position 23) for some more specific book types, such as large print or online. The nature of contents and biography data elements (positions 24-27, 34) will provide some of the finer grained formats like biography, dictionary, encyclopaedia and thesis. Literary form (position 33) will allow broader categorisation of material into groups such as fiction, non-fiction, short stories and poetry.

Field 007 also becomes important when dealing with items for readers with visual impairments, such as Braille or large print, so we’ll be looking there for these specific formats too.

With all formats we’ll be looking out for the new “online” form of item (position 23) to help us with identifying online resources and allowing for easy faceting of searches for online-only material.

Serials

For serials, we’ll once again look at the 008. The type of continuing resource (position 21) will help us identify items as newspaper, periodical or database resources. The form of original item (position 22) and form of item (position 23) will be used to flag information like if the item is microfilm, newspaper, large print or Braille. We’ll also be using information available in the 008 position 25-27 to identify formats such as comics/graphic novels.

Visual Material

Visual material is more complex: we’re dealing with many carriers (with a fast pace of change), and the various types of content that can be delivered on them.

The 007 field will be our primary reference: videorecording format (position 04) provides the carrier (DVD, Blu-ray etc.), which will be supported by checks elsewhere such as 538 $a for specific values. By looking at this data element we can separate DVDs, Blu-rays and VHS videos in the faceted search, which is important if a user doesn’t have a particular player and wishes to filter out certain formats.

Audio Recordings

MARC 21 has some very fine-grained types for sound recordings and music, however, identifying the carrier can be a little tricky because the material designation in 007 contains broad categories.  CD’s for example aren’t listed so we need to look at 007 position 03 to see a speed of 1.4m/s and position 06 for a diameter of 12cm; we’ll also look  at 500 $a and 300 $a. For musical recordings, we’ll be looking in 008 to get the different forms of composition (position 18-19). Position 30-31 will give the work types for literary recordings such as Drama, History, Comedy and Lectures.

Notated Music

Following on from music classification in audio recordings, items that are notated music will have specific data added to our model as well. Format of music (008 position 20) is the primary data element we’ll look at, followed by music parts (position 21) to describe what is included in the score. Target audience and transposition/arrangement (positions 22 and 33) will also be useful when looked at together, for example deriving that a score is a simplified arrangement for younger musicians.

Everything Else

We’ve discussed some formats in detail, but of course there are others, such as maps and computer files. We’ll apply a similar methodology to extracting as much other format information as possible from your records.

We’d love to hear if you have any comments or suggestions on our general approach; if you’d like to give us feedback you can either do it via email to Phil.John@talis.com or by posting a comment here on the blog.

Following a review of Talis Prism 3 development and the latest release, we have updated the Talis Prism 3 Roadmap. The next Talis Prism 3 Development Webinar has been scheduled for 12th April2010 and will look to focus on the Talis Prism 3 roadmap. If you were unable to attend a webinar and would like a more detailed explanation around the roadmap, or have any questions, then please contact Alison.Kershaw@talis.com.

One of the great features in Talis Prism 2 is the ability to specify searches that you know will appeal to your users and let them get into exploring the catalogue. These prepared searches are one of the most asked about features for Talis Prism 3 so I wanted to take a little time to explain how Talis Prism 3 works, starting from the point of view of Talis Prism 2…

Setting up prepared searches in Talis Prism 2 was not a straightforward task, you had to work out the SQL query that would bring back the results you wanted then put that into webmin as a prepared search. SQL is not a friendly language and you then had to know how to construct a link for the search and add it into your prepared search list.

Only administrators could set up these searches and they had to be linked in Talis Prism 2 to make them useful.

We wanted to make things easier in Talis Prism 3 and we think we have.

Any search can be used as a prepared search in Talis Prism 3. All you have to do is perform the search you want to do, refine the search using facets, order the search results as you want them and grab the URL out of the address bar in your browser. No SQL, no webmin.

You can do a number of things straight away with that search URL, you can bookmark it in the browser (something you can’t do with Talis Prism 2 searches) or you can use it as a link in a document, or send it to a friend in an email. Any search in Talis Prism 3 is linkable. You can even submit them to Google for indexing, as a number of our customers have.

In Talis Prism 2 you had all your prepared searches listed on a prepared search page. With Talis Prism 3 you can put those links in any web page you like, anywhere on the web. In Facebook, perhaps or on your library blog. Of course, you can also add them to your homepage using Talis Prism 3’s homepage fragment.

What this approach means is that prepared searches can be easily put together by anyone, and used in far more flexible ways than Talis Prism 2 prepared searches. In Talis Prism 3 the feature is so simple we don’t even call them prepared searches… we just call them searches.

Of course, Talis Prism 3 is still evolving and we have work yet to do. We know that one of the very common cases for prepared searches is to highlight new additions to your stock (using the date received from the order history table). Right now the data model inside Talis Prism 3 does not track that date, in fact it’s not in the marc records that get sent over to us. We’re working on fixing that, and as it’s such an important feature to so many of you we’ve worked out how we can bring that development forward to this quarter and we’re aiming for a beta with a few customers by the end of March. 🙂

The next Talis Prism 3 Development Update Webinar  on 8th March will look to explore this functionality further, if in the meantime you would like further information please email Imraz.Mohammed@Talis.com.

Following a review of Talis Prism 3 development, we have published the February Talis Prism 3 Roadmap and Talis Prism 3 Feature List.

The next Talis Prism 3 Development Webinar has been scheduled for 8th March 2010 and will look to focus on the Talis Prism 3 roadmap.  If you were unable to attend a webinar and would like a more detailed explanation around the roadmap, or have any questions, then please contact Alison.Kershaw@Talis.com.

Firstly, a big thank you to all those that attended our webinar on cross-searching multiple databases, your information was very helpful in directing our future plans for Talis Prism 3.

From your answers and comments we clarified that there are two key things you want to be able to do with Talis Prism, bring in your local collections and integrate with other, larger collections.

Integrating with Larger Collections

Many of you want to be able to direct your users to one or more larger collections such as the British Library or CURL in the event that they can’t find what they need within your collection. In some cases you want to be able to use the information from those collections to generate an ILL request to borrow the material needed.

This is a great thing to do as it supports your users in getting access to the materials they need and helps maintain your catalogue’s position as the starting point for any search.

Historically this has often been done using Z39.50 federated searching, a library-centric solution that predates the web by many years. To replace this functionality in Talis Prism 3 using Z39.50 would be costly and complex. In Talis Prism 2 the same functionality evolved over a period of several years. Doing the same in Talis Prism 3 would be a substantial cost and would only ever give access to the small number of services that have Z39.50 and that we could reliably configure.

A much more common approach today, both for libraries and for other services, is to use the services website directly. On the web generally this is often as simple as a link to the other service. To maintain a more controlled search experience and to allow for the data to be used in ILL requests in future we think it would be better to aim for a more seamless inclusion of those other sites’ searches.

A number of you have a strong desire to search a small number of sites as soon as possible and have your own web developers. This is exactly the kind of demand for extensibility that led us to seed the Juice project and there are already people on the Juice project doing similar things.

So, if you are one of those interested in connecting your users with the British Library, CURL, Library of Congress or Google Books and Amazon then please Join the Juice project, sign up to the Juice Discussion Group where you will find others, including some of us from Talis, taking advantage of Juice.

If you don’t have your own development resource and would like to discuss Talis writing custom extensions for you then please raise that with Alison Kershaw or your account manager.

If you have any specific queries about Juice then email Richard Wallis, coordinator of the Juice project.

Integrating Local Collections not in your LMS

Many of you also have local collections that for a number of reasons are managed outside of your LMS. DS Calm and iBase are common examples and you also talked about electronic serials data. Where the collection, and data about it, are under your ownership and control you expressed that you would like these to appear in Talis Prism searches as part of your whole collection.

In many cases the separation of these parts of your collection has been a side-effect of the tools needed to manage the data and is no longer serving your users well, so bringing this data together will be a good thing. Representing different types of asset within Talis Prism 3 is one of the drivers behind our re-working of the underlying data model and that stream of work will facilitate bringing in other collections in future. Look out for it appearing in future issues of the roadmap as we plan beyond our current horizon.

Our analysis of these collections shows that the detail of how each collection has been configured and how fields have been used is crucial to providing both appropriate indexing and display. This means that when we reach a position where this data could be brought into Talis Prism 3 there will almost certainly be a need for bespoke consultancy. That consultancy is likely to be needed in order to understand what form the data is in, how you’ve used the product locally and how you want those collections to appear in Talis Prism 3.

If you have other local collections, keep an eye on the roadmap and the blog so that when we start looking at this area in detail you know to get involved.

The Talis Prism roadmap is available from the Talis Prism site.

Rob Styles
Technical Lead, Talis Prism 3

Following feedback from the Talis Prism 3 webinars held last month, we identified a difference between the Single Sign On shown on the Talis Prism 3 Roadmap, and the immediate requirement to replicate the Talis Prism 2 Single Sign On with Talis Keystone View My Account (VMA). We have investigated this, and look to run this as a Consultancy project, but would like to organise a webinar to validate requirements and identify customers who would be willing to test this with us.

To register for this session on Tuesday 1st September at 1:30pm, please email Alison Kershaw stating that you would like to attend, we will then send you details on how to register.