We’re pleased to announce that the recent Prism 3 release preview has been released to the live Prism 3 environment. For further details on what has changed, please refer to the release preview blog post.

We’ve released this a little earlier than we normally would to ensure that certain features were out in time for our academic customers entering the start of a new semester.

Keep up with the latest Talis Prism 3 news and developments on the Talis Prism 3 website and blog.

We’ve just released the latest version of Talis Prism 3 for everyone to preview; this release contains some essential precursors for introducing the Semantic Data Model, as well as several other under-the-bonnet tweaks.

The biggest change in this release is a new session tracking system. By tweaking how we handle “my account” sessions, we’ve been able make some changes which will allow us to further improve performance in Prism 3 going forward.

We’ve also enabled Talis Aspire integration, allowing those of you with our next-generation resource list management system to flag what lists an item appears on. If your institution uses Talis Aspire and you would like us to enable this integration, please raise a support request and we will make the necessary configuration changes.

For those of you undertaking your own styling, we’ve introduced a new theme fragment for placing all JavaScript includes; this allows us to control when they are sent to the browser, optimising the performance of your Prism 3 tenancy.

Finally, this version contains the first release of the Semantic Data Model. This will be trialled with several beta customers before being made more widely available. The work released today includes the new “Format” and “Content” facets, as well as display of Alternate Graphic Representation (MARC21 field 880) on item pages. Here’s a sneak preview of this new feature:

Main record representation

Alternate graphic representation shown after clicking on the "Chinese" tab.

As you can see, this release contains quite a lot of “under-the-bonnet” work so we’d really appreciate it if you can all cast an eye over your tenancies. To view the release preview, simply place /demo/ after the prism.talis.com part of your url, e.g. http://prism.talis.com/demo/leicestershire/.

If you have any questions on this, or other issues, 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 4th October 2010 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

• General Update
  • Admin Console
  • Talis Library Ideas
  • Coming in the next release
  • Update on Semantic Data Model

• Roadmap/next steps –
  • Improvements in My Account efficiency
  • 20% Dev time for ideas forum ideas
  • Improvements to advanced search

• Questions

The next webinar will be on 4^th October, details will be posted on the Talis Prism blog shortly.

[podcast format=”video”]http://talis-videos.s3.amazonaws.com/prism_webinar_230810.mp4[/podcast]

Talis Library Ideas enables customers to openly contribute and track ideas on Talis product development, to shape them collaboratively and to indicate their importance.

This 45 minute webinar will cover the purpose and principles of Talis Library Ideas; how to approach the submission of ideas; using your votes; a demonstration of how to use the system; and how ideas feed into the development of Talis products. The main product focus will be Talis Prism 3, as the first product with a forum in Talis Library Ideas.

A repeat of this free webinar has been scheduled to give you a choice of dates.

Date:     Wednesday 1st September 2010
Time:     11:00 – 11:45
Register here for your free place

Date:     Thursday 2nd September 2010
Time:     14:00 – 14:45
Register here for your free place

To keep up to date with the latest Talis Prism 3 Developments you can register for the free webinar on Monday 23rd August 2010 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]

Following on from Terry’s post about the way that Highland libraries have embedded the Prism search box into their Facebook page, I was interested to see how Leeds Libaries are taking an opposite view – and using their Prism interface to surface the feed from their Facebook site.

As many libraries seek to attract new users and engage with their customers, it’s becoming increasingly important to be able to create not only a suitably branded web presence for the library catalogue, but also one that offers multiple channels to ‘speak’ to users. Currently Leeds Libraries  are parallel running their ‘old’ catalogue with the new interface, which is allowing them to fully ‘road test’ the functionality and get feedback from users as to what they want to see. 

The integration of the Facebook feed on the front page, allows for a seamless ‘news’ feature to appear on their catalogue home page, the recent information covers such diverse topics as the death of the writer Beryl Bainbridge to encouraging people to still celebrate the World Cup. This is all contained within a well designed page, making the information easy for users of the catalogue to consume.  The flexibility of the interface aids the useability of the interface, and keeps it fresh and entertaining.

Have a look here to see what you think.

We’re pleased to announce that the recent Prism 3 release preview has been released to the live Prism 3 environment. For further details on what has changed, please refer to the release preview blog post.

This release enables us to widen availability of the Admin Console, please contact support and raise a service request if you would like us to set up credentials for you.

Keep up with the latest Talis Prism 3 news and developments on the Talis Prism 3 website and blog.

We’ve just released the latest version of Talis Prism 3 for customers to preview; as well as a small under the hood change to improve “My Account” page rendering times, this version contains a few tweaks to the search system:

• Facets now persist when changing sort order
• Exact searches no longer widen terms to include stemmed versions
• New “series:” index name enabled
• Other small tweaks to improve the relevance of certain searches

Finally, we’ve included a method for customers who are currently using the Admin Console to force through changes immediately; this will allow us to widen availability to all customers with Prism 3.

You can access the preview by putting demo/ directly after the prism.talis.com address, for example http://prism.talis.com/demo/leicestershire/.

If you have any questions on this, or other issues, feel free to email me phil.john@talis.com or your account manager (or comment here, of course).