This release includes:

• More textual improvements to the Welsh language interface
• Increased stability of user sessions, meaning a reduction in the errors that sometimes occur in borrower services such as renew, reserve and cancel reservation.

Customers with Talis Prism 3 are now able to preview the new release, as usual, with a fully functioning view of their own catalogue and data but using this new version of the software.

Release to the live service is scheduled for Tuesday 21st July.

On Monday 13 July we introduced an improvement to the processing of bibliographic updates to Talis Prism 3. This is a change that we have been planning and developing for some time. The updates from each library now have their own channel so, under normal load, they do not impact on the updates of others.

Early indications are that this has substantially reduced the time between making a change to a record in your local system and seeing it in Talis Prism 3. This is based on both the system logs and the experience of a number of customers who have reported a definite improvement.

Your local system regularly checks for bibliographic record changes which are then sent as updates to Talis Prism 3. Typically these changes will appear in Talis Prism 3 within minutes, although when there are large numbers of changes they are placed in a queue and will take longer to appear. The new parallel processing system means that high volumes of updates being processed for other customers are much less likely to impact the timeliness of your updates.

As part of wider ongoing work to improve the performance of Talis Prism 3, we have further plans for the development of the updating process. Currently, updates are sent by the local system, as described above. We will change it to a harvesting model where the local system prepares the updates and Prism centrally manages the collection of that data. This will give more control to the Prism update system, enabling it to be more efficient and to manage updates on a greater scale.

This release fixes a problem where Hotlink URLs as displayed in Talis Prism Availability did not work when they contained an ampersand.

Customers with Prism 3 have been able to preview this change against their own catalogues, and the release now makes it live for all of them.

Today we are pleased to release to the live service the Welsh translation work and other changes described in an earlier post.

The live customers have been able to preview the new release, as usual, with a fully functioning view of their own catalogue and data but using this new version of the software. Both the preview and the live release become available to all Prism 3 customers for no effort on their part – a benefit of the Software as a Service model of Prism 3.

We’d love to hear what you think of Prism 3, either in comments to this blog post or in the Prism forum.

The main focus of this release is a full Welsh translation. Building on earlier foundation work for handling translations and in collaboration with some customers, Talis Prism can now be configured to offer users the option to view it in English or Welsh and to easily switch between them. Additionally, we have provided a language entry point so that the user can choose their language preference on a preliminary page before entering Talis Prism.

More detailed logging of timings in Talis Prism has been included to help us target the most productive areas for performance improvements

Finally, we have included fixes to bugs with the ‘Print’ option and the ‘Availability’ link under ‘Get this item’ on the Item Detail page.

Customers with Prism 3 are now able to preview the new release, as usual, with a fully functioning view of their own catalogue and data but using this new version of the software.

Release to the live service is scheduled for Tuesday 23rd June.

This release fixes a problem inadvertently introduced last week where the Electronic Location and Access field (MARC field 856), which should display in the Details area of the Item Detail page, was no longer displaying.

The fix is immediately active for all customers.

Today we’re pleased to announce the release to the live service of some core developments that are required to provide the foundation for planned functionality as outlined in our Prism Roadmap. In addition, this release fixes some issues affecting links in the ‘Find more by…’ area of the Item details page.

The live customers have been able to preview the new release, as usual, with a fully functioning view of their own catalogue and data but using this new version of the software. Both the preview and the live release become available to all Prism 3 customers for no effort on their part – a benefit of the Software as a Service model of Prism 3.

We’d love to hear what you think of Prism 3, either in comments to this blog post or in the Prism forum.

This roadmap gives a broad indication of the development plans for TalisPrism. It shows the main themes on which development work will focus in periods of three months. Features are released when they are ready, with the emphasis on little and often.

We’re working hard to deliver as much value as possible under each theme, but software development time-scales are notoriously hard to predict so we cannot reliably be more specific about features and release dates until close to a release. One reason for this is that the themes cannot be exclusive – we’ll also work on other issues as the need arises. We’ll update the roadmap as the product and our plans evolve.

April 2009 – June 2009

• Administration interface for library system administrators to manage aspects such as styling, data display and languages
• Facilities to create, upload and share extensions that embed or link to external services and content
• Option to use the institution’s hostname in the Prism URL, such as library.myuni.ac.uk or library.authority.gov.uk, making it look more integrated into the institution and bringing technical benefits

July 2009 – September 2009

• Provide more flexibility for indexing and display
• Improve search, including enhanced relevance ranking, facet options, advanced search options, related searches
• Increase data upload efficiency and performance whilst supporting more libraries

October 2009 – December 2009

• Discovery features, such as browsing authors and subjects, taking advantage of semantic data
• Provide a Linked Data API to allow catalogue data to integrate with other services, using the Semantic Web Linked Data approach

January 2010 – March 2010

• Make integration with the library system more efficient and open, allowing improved availability information and borrower services

Recent releases

The value of our Software as a Service approach was proved again when an issue was found during the release  preview that was made available to Prism 3 customers last week. As well as showing the value of the release process it demonstrates its flexibility, allowing adjustments, and the approach of continual improvement at no deployment cost to customers .

Today’s release for preview fixes the issue and includes further foundation work to make the management of interface languages much easier and more effective.

Release to the live service is now scheduled for Wednesday 13th May.

This release contains core developments required as a foundation for planned functionality over the next few releases, and it fixes some issues affecting links under the ‘Find more by…’ area of the Item details page. This release does not introduce any new functionality.

Customers with Prism 3 are now able to preview the new release, as usual, with a fully functioning view of their own catalogue and data but using this new version of the software.

Release to the live service is scheduled for Tuesday 5th May.