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.

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.

The latest Prism Development Update webinars took place on Monday 2nd July. We are not able to provide a video of the webinar this time, so here is a summary of the content.

Next/Previous buttons is one of the top voted Prism Ideas, for browsing back and forth in results at the item detail level. We demonstrated the implementation of this feature, which will be in the next release. Preserving the context is crucial and it will do that even when the URL for an item detail page is saved and used again later.

Renewal workflow. We demonstrated a re-designed process for renewing loans to make it quicker, more informative and easier to see the outcomes, for inclusion in the next release. It all happens in the loans page, with the outcome for each loan displayed in context, as well as a summary at the top of the page. The outcome of each renewal action is added into the page without refreshing the whole page, so that it keeps up with you as you quickly renew multiple loans individually. Furthermore, having been clicked, the ‘Renew’ button will be disabled and it will display a relevant, configurable text indicating either success or an exception, until you refresh the page. A single exception message will be displayed even when the system identifies multiple exceptions, selected from a preference order, so that the user is not overloaded with information. We are continuing to refine the display, so the release may differ from the images shown here.

Display of the Reserve button. The top requirement in Prism Ideas is to make the Reserve button context-aware so that it only displays when the item is reservable. This was not quite ready to demonstrate, but most of the work has been done, including a new service in the Local Data Services (LDS) to interrogate your local system. When there are no reservable copies, some configurable text will display instead of the button. When the user is not signed in, this will be done 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 will take account of the borrower type to suppress the button additionally where there are no reservable copies for that borrower type even though there may be for other borrower types. This will be included in the next release but the LDS upgrade will be required to enable it to work.

Feedback spam honeypot. Tasty as it may sound, 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’ll add a field that’s hidden in the Prism interface but visible to software agents; when a message includes data in that field we’ll discard the message. This will be included in the next release.

Notes data. We are re-working notes data in the Prism data model. This will address issues of duplication and ordering of notes. We are also identifying structure, wherever possible, in appropriate kinds of notes, to improve display and indexing; this has been done for contents notes so that Prism can give a more organised and readable dispay, including hierarchical structure in some cases, as well as indexing author and title information appropriately. This will be included in the next release of Prism.

Enhanced enrichments. This development builds on the Notes data work and will follow in the subsequent release. Textual enrichments such as tables of contents and summaries from BDS or your preferred supplier will be included in your catalogue, where they don’t already exist in your bibliographic record. This will include indexing to provide greater discoverability of your resources. Additionally, further types of enrichment will be enabled for display, such as video clips. For the pricing of enhanced enrichment data, please consult your Account Manager.

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 will 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.

Reviews. Matt demonstrated the design and workflow for user-contributed reviews. This is work in progress for a later release. Reviews will be listed in a Community contributions panel on the right of the item detail page. The full reviews will be on a separate page. Users will be able to report inappropriate content, as with shared lists. Initially, reviews will not be attributed to their author – this will come in a further development when users will be able to set up their own public profile. To create a review the user will enter a title and review text – both are required, and configurable prompt text can be displayed in the boxes. A ‘preview’ feature will show the user what the review will look like when it is published. Ratings and reviews will be separate, but when both are enabled then the user will be able to rate the item in the same page as entering their review.

To keep up to date with the latest Prism Developments you can register for the free webinar on Monday 2^nd July 2012 at 12:00 for Public Libraries and 14:00 for Academic Libraries.

In this webinar we’ll discuss the latest Prism developments and review the Prism Roadmap, as well as giving you an opportunity to raise any specific questions that you may have.

Academic libraries register at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/743569137

Public libraries register at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/165826369

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

In the meantime keep up with the latest Prism news and developments on the Prism website and here on the Prism 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.

Agenda

• Roadmap overview
• Latest release
  • List sharing
  • Fix to handling titles with semicolons
  • Format display: include ‘Thesis’; demote ‘Reproduction’
• Next release
  • Next/Previous buttons
  • Quick reviews
  • Start of move to new domain name: capitadiscovery.co.uk/com
  • Remove reserve button for non-reservable items
• Roadmap/next steps
• Tour
• Admin console refresh – user roles
• Augmented discovery implementations

[podcast format=”video”]http://talis-videos.s3.amazonaws.com/prism_webinar_140512.mp4[/podcast]

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.

To keep up to date with the latest Prism Developments you can register for the free webinar on Monday 14th May 2012 at 12:00 for Academic Libraries and 14:00 for Public Libraries. Please note that these start times are different than previously to make them more convenient for participants.

Academic libraries click here to register.

Public libraries click here to register.

In this webinar we’ll discuss the latest Prism developments and review the Prism Roadmap, as well as giving you an opportunity to raise any specific questions that you may have.

In the meantime keep up with the latest Prism news and developments on the Prism website and here in the blog.

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.

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

• Introductions
• Roadmap
• Next release
  • Format precedence – reproduction lower, add thesis to list
  • Fix to title handler for full stops instead of semicolons
  • Format css class if mobile/html5 on
  • Lists and moderation in the Admin Console
• Roadmap – Next steps
  • Social features: Quick reviews
  • Development of “is reservable” check
  • Augmented discovery implementations
  • Domain name change – update

[podcast format=”video”]http://talis-videos.s3.amazonaws.com/prism_webinar_260312.mp4[/podcast]

To keep up to date with the latest Prism Developments you can register for the free webinar on Monday 26th March 2012 at 12:30 for Public Libraries and 14:00 for Academic Libraries.

Public libraries click here to register.

Academic libraries click here to register.

In this webinar we’ll discuss the latest Prism developments and review the Prism Roadmap, as well as giving you an opportunity to raise any specific questions that you may have.

In the meantime keep up with the latest Prism news and developments on the Prism website and here in the blog.