I’m pleased to announce that the upgrade to BDS cover images is now live as the default in Prism catalogues. Today’s switch to BDS was enabled in the latest release of Prism last week and is the first step in implementing an agreement with BDS to provide Prism users with extended enrichments.

Details of the agreement for enhanced enrichments from BDS  were given in a webinar last month which is available as a video.

BDS images are now provided by default but you can opt for an alternative supplier.

With the switch to BDS you will see
- more cover images for books
- cover images for audio and video resources where your record includes the International Article Number (EAN) or Universal Product Code (UPC). This gives considerable extra scope to the coverage of images in your catalogue.

The BDS images are generally larger, giving greater clarity and detail, because the width is fixed to fill the space available, whereas previously the longest edge was a fixed length.

Some good examples of the extra coverage in Southwark Libraries’ catalogue:
- New acquisitions in the Music Catalogue
- New acquisitions in the Film Catalogue
- Lord of the rings (books, CD, Blu-ray …)

Smaller images will be coming in a future release for the mobile interface and for lists in the My Account area.

I’m pleased to announce the release of the latest version of Prism to the live service. This version has been available for preview since 25th July and was described in detail in the preview release notice. The main inclusions are:

- Improved display of formats in initial results display for Semantic Data Model records
- Support for Audio Visual (non-ISBN) cover images
- Addition of two new theme fragments

The improved display of formats is dependent on having implemented the new version of MarcGrab, which is currently being rolled out.

We announced in a  Prism blog post and elsewhere that we have formed an agreement with BDS to provide Prism users with extended enrichments. That is enabled by this release but the switch to BDS will be made separately later. As stated in recent newsletters, please let us know by 15th August if you wish to stay with Nielson Book Data. Please contact your account manager if you wish to discuss Prism enrichments further.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions on this release please get in touch; you can comment here on the blog, on the forums and Prism Ideas or contact your account manager or the Prism team directly.

The enthusiastic use made of the Prism Ideas forum by a large proportion of Prism customers is very encouraging and it is proving valuable as  guide to priorities for development. This enthusiasm has also been manifested in feedback on the forum itself, primarily asking for more votes to make it easier to add more ideas. You need a spare vote to be able to add an idea and temporarily borrowing a vote from another idea is a cumbersome process. More votes may also give further discrimination amongst the most popular ideas.

In the light of this feedback and having reviewed the effect of twenty votes in the Alto forum, we have today increased the number of votes that a user can cast in the Prism Ideas forum to twenty.

To date, fifty-eight ideas have been submitted to the Prism forum. We’ve completed eight ideas and another seven are either planned or work has started. When an idea is completed, the votes are returned for re-use.

Fifty-three customers have registered for Prism Ideas and forty-nine have voted. That’s out of fifty-four customers who are live with Prism and around another ten preparing to go live.

We’re spending at least twenty percent of each development period on ideas from the forum, and we’re looking forward to seeing more ideas and clearer trends from the increase in votes.

The latest release of Prism, when supplied with data from the new MarcGrab, re-models title and statement of responsibility information from MARC field 245, analysing the different kinds of data that MARC often lumps together, to make better use of it. One benefit of this is that any number-and-name-of-part information embedded in subfield $c (statement of responsibility, etc) is now appended to the main title so that you can see all of the precise title information together. Another benefit is the display of the statement of responsibility.

Historically, a General Material Designator (GMD) has been added to title information to give some indication of the kind of material of the item. However, its general nature has always been unsatisfactory because users want more precise information, and this is why, in the new cataloguing rules, RDA, the GMD is dropped in favour of more specific alternatives. For these reasons we have omitted the GMD.

A better alternative to the GMD is accurate format information, presented so the user can see at a glance what it is. The format is already in a regular position at the beginning of a line, but to improve its display we’re proposing the following changes:

• Move the summary snippet to the foot of the entry
• Select the most specific format term, where more than one is currently given, according to a preference list. For example, select ‘eBook’ from ‘Electronic resource, eBook, Book’
• Display the selected format in bold
• Place the edition statement and the year of publication, in that order, after the language, to give more prominence to these important elements
• Change the label ‘Published’ to ‘Publisher’ and unbold it by default, so that it does not distract attention from the earlier elements.

It is posible to hide the language and publisher elements with styling tools (a simple update to you site.css file). It is also possible to hide just the default language, that is, the language of your catalogue, usually ‘English’. For details of how to apply these changes, or to request us to do it for you, please raise a Support case.

This proposal is only about results entries, not the Item Detail page. There are other issues and ideas for the Item Detail page, which will be addressed later.

We’ve put together some examples. Please click on the image to get a full size view. Cover images have been omitted from the examples but they would be there, as now, in the implementation.

We’d love to hear your views on this proposal. Please comment on this blog post, or you can email me terry.willan@capita.co.uk. As soon as a favourable consensus is clear we’ll start work on this with a view to getting it into the next release of Prism.

The new feature to export to citation tools should be useful to researchers in all types of library, without hindering anyone who doesn’t want to use it.

However, if it is felt that it would not be relevant to any users of your library service, it can be suppressed. If you wish to do so, please raise a Support case.

I’m pleased to announce that the latest version of Prism has now been released to the live service. It has been available for preview since 27th May.

New features in this release include the ability to create lists of items and to export information to reference management tools such as Endnote, RefWorks and Zotero.

Other features in this release and in the previous release, including Loan History, will become active when you get the new Local Data Services and MarcGrab. A roll out programme to deploy these on request has begun.

For more detail about this Prism release, please see the  preview release notice.

If you have any questions about this release you can comment on this blog, or contact me terry.willan@capita.co.uk or contact your Account Manager.

It’s great to find what you need in the library catalogue, but it is also important to have services and tools to do useful things with the catalogue data. So I’m happy to announce that the ability to export records to reference management tools and the ability to save records in lists are both features of the latest release of Prism, now available for preview.

The export feature allows you to export to Endnote and RefWorks as well as to export in RIS format, which can be imported automatically by tools such as Reference Manager and Zotero. You can export individual records from either the search results page or the item detail page, and you can also export the contents of a saved list. When in a list, you can also export the data as a comma separated file (csv).

The lists feature allows you to create temporary lists as an anonymous guest user when you’re not signed in to your account, and to create permanent lists when you are signed in. A temporary list automatically becomes a permanent one when you sign in. You can save individual items to a list from either the results page or the item detail page and either add them to an existing list or create a new list by specifying a new list name. To view your lists there is a new ‘My Lists’ link in addition to the user tools links to My Account and Logout. The My Lists link shows the number of lists you have and takes you to a page detailing your lists.

You can see the export and lists features demonstrated in the video of the May Prism Development Update Webinar, starting at about 20 minutes in.

This new release of Prism also includes some other new features.

• Classification search. This is an addition to the Semantic Data Model where your local classifications are identified and indexed. You will need the new MarcGrab to refresh your data to get the benefit of this – we are about to start deploying the new MarcGrab and you are invited to raise a Support case to indicate your requirement for it. Your classifications will be searchable along with all other indexed terms, and you will also be able to target them with an expert search qualifier, ‘class:’, e.g. ‘class:641.5’. This is in addition to the existing qualifier ‘dewey:’ which searches Dewey class numbers from field 082 in the MARC record.

• Identifiers. The Semantic Data Model will now also identify different types of data identifier and make them all searchable: ISBN (already searchable), ISSN, ISMN and EAN. Again, this is dependent on the new MarcGrab. A bug is also fixed where the display of ISBNs was duplicated.

• Statement of Responsibility display. Another addition to the Semantic Data Model, this is also dependent on the new MarcGrab. It will provide the contents of MARC field 245 subfield $c displayed as a note. It will display by default but can be suppressed using styling tools.

• Cover images from Syndetics. This new Prism release includes a plugin to retrieve cover images from Syndetics if you subscribe to them. This can replace the existing Juice-based tool that currently retrieves Syndetics images. If you wish to use this, please raise a Support case.

To access the preview, insert ‘/demo/’ after the prism.talis.com part of your URL and before the name of your tenancy, e.g. http://prism.talis.com/demo/worcestershire/. This 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.

The purpose of the preview is to allow you to explore and become familiar with the new features before they are released to your users, and to ensure that everything is working correctly, particularly in relation to any local styling and other customisations.

All being well we aim to release this version to the live service on 14th June.

If you have questions on this or any other issue, please feel free to email me, terry.willan@capita.co.uk, or your Account Manager, or add a comment on this blog post.

We have updated the Talis Prism 3 Roadmap to reflect further plans for development. As usual, the Roadmap will be a reference point in the next Talis Prism 3 Development Update Webinar, which is scheduled  for Monday 21st March 2011 at 12:30 for Public Libraries and 14:00 for Academic Libraries. Please follow the link for details on how to register.

Following the recent release to preview of the latest version of Talis Prism 3, we’re now beginning the beta test with five customers for those features that require an upgrade to the Local Data services (LDS) software.

The LDS runs in your local environment and handles dynamic interactions between Prism 3 and your local database, such as fetching availability information and managing renewals and reservations.

The main new features that require the LDS upgrade are Loan History, which will display under an additional tab in the re-designed My Account area that you have in the Prism 3 release preview, and the display of an ‘In Transit’ status in the availability area on the Item Detail page. The LDS software has also undergone major revision ‘under the bonnet’, providing the foundation for more efficient further development.

The beta test is expected to take several weeks. After initial testing by library staff using the library’s sandbox Prism 3 tenancy, the new LDS will be applied to the live local environment making the new features live for the beta libraries’ users, for a period of close monitoring.

We’re developing the LDS so that it can be updated automatically, making it much easier to deliver improvements in future. We’re including appropriate tools to allow you to remain in control, but crucially it eliminates time-consuming manual intervention. The beta test will encompass this auto-update aspect, so that the general release roll-out will be the last time manual intervention will be needed.

The version of Prism 3 that is currently available for preview works with both the old and new versions of LDS, detecting them automatically. We’ll leave it on preview for a little longer for you to check, but we’ll put it live soon to give your users those benefits that don’t depend on the new LDS.

Two vital aspects of delivering a service in the cloud, such as Talis Prism 3, are to ensure that the service is available for a very high proportion of the time, and that it performs well. Naturally we monitor these closely, and now you can see the information directly from the monitoring service.

You’ll find the link to the Prism Service Availability monitor on the Talis Prism microsite in the left panel under Customer Resources.

The information is updated every five minutes. At the top there is a status indicator showing the current availability of the Prism 3 service.

The rest of the report shows uptime and average response time per month, most recent first, and you can select a month to see daily averages. Our target for uptime is 99.5% or better, so it is pleasing that the monthly average since February 2009 is 99.86% and that the last three complete months are all higher than that. We continue to strive to improve this further.

The montly average response times show an improving trend through 2010, during which twenty-four libraries went live with Prism 3, bringing the total to thirty-seven. This reflects the continuing effort to improve performance.

In addition to providing this information, we are working towards improved status information about Prism 3 on the Talis Live Services page.