The Library and systems team at the University of Northampton have this week released their new Talis Prism 3 catalogue to students. They’ve provided a link from the library homepage here and are encouraging students to give them lots of feedback on it whilst they parallel run Prism 2 and Prism 3.

The University undertook their own design work and have tied it to the look and feel of the University brand – giving a seamless feeling for students using disparate library services.

Mike Aynsworth, Information Systems Manager, told me that “Prism 3 has been configured at the University of Northampton primarily for student resource discovery. We’ve used the Juice project to extend the catalogue to include links to COPAC, Waterstones, Amazon, SFX, Northamptonshire libraries and other useful alternative sources”.

The links out to SFX are especially interesting, as the technical team at the University have utilised Juice to point students directly to the full text where it is available, and when not, it takes students to the SFX listings. The team are planning to further extend their alternative resources by adding in direct links to ebooks too.

The use of social media is incorporated too, with the option for students to bookmark searches with Delicious.

The team are also using the flexible design of the user interface to cater for the OPAC machines actually within the library, allowing for a more locked down “kiosk mode”.

To see the University of Northampton’s catalogue in action go to: http://prism.talis.com/northampton-ac

The University of Chichester are now live with their new catalogue, parallel running both Prism 2 and Prism 3 for a few weeks before moving to Prism 3 as the default catalogue. This gives staff and students alike a great opportunity to try out the new OPAC as the project team in charge of the implementation at the University were keen to allow staff and students to migrate to the new service naturally.

Prism 3 has been created to make the design of the user interface extremely flexible and the project team have created the design to fit in seamlessly with the branding of the University. The team were also able to link other useful information into the header such as library opening hours and location information.

The University have aso blogged about the release, at English Liblog@chi here.

We’ve had great feedback on our Prism design for Sheffield. It’s work in progress and we expect changes as the team at Sheffield want to get to grips with using it. We’ve opted for a similar aesthetic to the current website so that the access is seamless when navigating from the library homepage.
 

Click on the images for a larger view – tell us what you think.