We’re pleased to announce that the latest version of Prism has been released for everyone to preview; this release has the following changes:

Improved display of formats in initial results display for Semantic Data Model records

The Semantic Data Model title work, launched last month, makes some changes to the way we extract data from the 245 field; part of this was dropping subfield $h from the display in favour of more descriptive terms found elsewhere in a record. We’ve tweaked the search results page, as originally discussed on the blog a few weeks ago, to draw more attention to the format by making it bold and displaying the most specific term, e.g. “eBook” rather than “Book, eBook, Eletronic Resource”. The end result is a more consistent experience – borrowers only need to look in a single place as they scan the page and the terminology used is the same from record to record. We’ve made  a few other tweaks to the appearance of this page to make the layout more consistent as well. As with other Semantic Data Model features, you’ll need to be on the new version of marcgrab to see these changes.

The revised format display

Support for Audio Visual (non-ISBN) cover images

To support the upcoming switch to BDS for Prism enrichments, we’ve enabled cover images for non-ISBN records; this will show, subject to coverage, images for records that have an EAN or UPC catalogued in the 024 field. These images will start displaying once we complete the transition in the coming weeks and we’ll put out a notice when this happens. Customers with Syndetics enrichments can also benefit from this development; please raise a service request and we will make the required configuration changes to your tenancy.

Addition of two new theme fragments

A common request we receive is for more control over the “My Account” login page, so we’ve added a new theme fragment which allows you to insert content in the same way as the homepage and header fragments. We’re releasing a small update to the Admin Console early this week which will pick up a file named “login.html” that you upload to your theme and insert it into your tenancy.

Another page we’re enabling further customisation of is the no results screen. Uploading a file called “noresults.html” to your tenancy theme will include it below the existing content. This fragment is treated a bit differently to others as it allows you to access the search query and insert it into your custom content, for example in a link to another search system such as Copac, the British Library or Google Books. As with the login fragment, this also relies on the Admin Console release this week.

No results fragment linking to Copac, The British Library and Google Books

Taking advantage of this new functionality is easy, just insert the following snippet anywhere in the fragment:

{{ query }}

If you’d like to provide links to prepared searches on other discovery interfaces you’ll need to change that slightly and “url encode” it; this makes sure it’s properly formatted for use in a hyperlink:

{{ query|url_encode }}

The full example in the screenshot above is:

<p>You can also try your search for "{{ query }}" on some other catalogues:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://copac.ac.uk/search?&any={{ query|url_encode }}">Search for "{{ query }}" on COPAC</a></li>
<li><a href="http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?mode=Basic&vid=BLVU1&vl(freeText0)={{ query|url_encode }}&fn=search&tab=local_tab&">Search for "{{ query }}" on the British Library OPAC</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q={{ query|url_encode }}">Search for "{{ query }}" on Google Books</a>
</ul>

We’re planning on releasing these changes to the live service within the next week, so would really appreciate everyone trying these new features on their tenancy. As usual, you can preview this release by prepending your tenancy name with “demo/”, for example:

http://prism.talis.com/demo/manchester-ac/

or

http://prism.talis.com/demo/southwark/

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

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.

An ongoing development theme, running in tandem with our other efforts, is a continual focus on improving performance in Prism 3. To validate this work, we have monitoring set up for several tenancies.

I’ve extracted logs from two tenancies and put together charts showing the marked improvement in response times over the last 12 months. The three lines on the chart show the average response time in seconds for the catalogue landing page (home), a search against the catalogue (search) and displaying an item/work (item):

Public tenancy (click to enlarge)

Academic tenancy (click to enlarge)

It’s great to see that all three are loading in under half a second, making the experience for your end users much snappier. This isn’t to say that our work in this area is done – there are more tweaks we are planning to put in place in Prism 3, and the underlying platform it runs upon. Thanks to the “Software as a Service” model used for Prism 3, we can roll out these improvements as soon as they are ready.

The application is just part of the picture though; if you’ve created your own theming/styling for Prism 3, ensuring this is suitably optimised will also improve the performance for your end users. Much of the perceived slowness in a website is actually waiting for items to render once they’ve been downloaded, and you can do a lot to improve this. Properly optimising a design is a lengthy topic, which is covered in far more detail elsewhere (e.g. the Yahoo Performance Rules), but here are some quick tips:

• Make sure you optimise images and choose the right formats. Use a program like Adobe Fireworks to compress images; if you have a photo on your catalogue home, you can usually compress it by about 85% with no loss of detail. For logos, avoid JPEGs, use PNG and set it to the exact colour-palette to keep the filesize down
• If you use a series of backgrounds or icons, consider using CSS Sprites to combine them into one image file. This will reduce the overall number of requests for a page and speed up its delivery
• Put Javascript as close to the bottom of the page as possible (in Prism 3 this means the end of your footer fragment). Since Javascript is interpreted by the browser as soon as it loads, large scripts in the head of a document can cause a delay before a page renders properly
• Combine scripts into one file; as with images, loading lots of small pieces has more overhead than one larger file
• Minify CSS and Javascript, tools like the YUI Compressor can cut the filesize and hence the time taken to download these elements
• Make sure you remove styles only used in development, or which use hooks deprecated from the Prism 3 interface (such as the old availability layout)

If you’d like to discuss this, or any other issue, please either leave a comment here, or email Phil.John@talis.com.

Highland Libraries has a vibrant Facebook page and we were delighted to see that it now includes a search box to search their Talis Prism 3 catalogue. Highland Libraries has been offering Prism 3 alongside their Prism 2.1 catalogue since early March.

Embedding the Prism 3 search box in any site is simply

a matter of pasting some code into the site page. You can find all you need here in the Talis Developer wiki, which is accessible from the Prism 3 web site.

We’d love to hear from other libraries who have done this or who have extended their Talis Prism 3 catalogue in other ways.

You’ve heard us talking a lot about the Semantic Data Model (I provided a brief summary during the last Webinar, and it’s been covered in some detail on the blog posting back in January). What is it going to mean over the next few months for your Prism 3 catalogue though?

The need to move away from a field based record representation to one made up of links between different entities is very important for improving the user experience in Prism 3. Moving towards a linked data model gives us several benefits:

• your catalogue will become more browsable through the introduction of dedicated pages for authors, subjects, artists, and more
• Prism 3 will also function as an API, allowing other applications or your extensions to tap into and use your data in new ways
• we can weave information from other sources into the item display, augmenting the excellent data already present in your catalogue.

The most important thing to note is that we aren’t “going dark” for an extended period, to emerge with the new data model as a finished item; we’re going to be tackling the task in a series of small, gradual steps. Throughout the next two quarters we’re aiming to provide regular releases when we finish each section, adding value straight away. The first area of data that we’re tackling is format.

Format

The MARC 21 specification offers a rich framework for describing the format of resources that we can mine to get better context for the items in your catalogue; this also underpins other work we want to implement, such as tailoring display of items to the demands of their media; by identifying “what” an item is, we can display context-sensitive enrichment. With CDs this could mean showing track listings fetched from MusicBrainz, and perhaps a short audio preview; with books, a synopsis would be more suitable (from the MARC record, or fetched from an external resource such as LibraryThing); for films, cast and production lists.

In the work on format, we’re modelling both the form of content, such as dictionary, thesis, film, or poetry, and the carrier format such as Large print, CD or DVD. The model will enable the display of meaningful and specific terms to users in both descriptions and navigation options, such as E-book, DVD, VHS and Blu-ray.

This is dependent on the data, of course. Format information will be extracted from all the relevant standard places in your MARC records and mapped into the data model. Some of the key parts of the MARC record for this include the Type of record and the Bibliographic level (Leader/06 and 07), control fields 007, 008 and 006, as well as data fields such as 300 and some notes.

Books

If an item is classed as a book, the most important field we’ll be looking at is 008. We’ll look at form of item (position 23) for some more specific book types, such as large print or online. The nature of contents and biography data elements (positions 24-27, 34) will provide some of the finer grained formats like biography, dictionary, encyclopaedia and thesis. Literary form (position 33) will allow broader categorisation of material into groups such as fiction, non-fiction, short stories and poetry.

Field 007 also becomes important when dealing with items for readers with visual impairments, such as Braille or large print, so we’ll be looking there for these specific formats too.

With all formats we’ll be looking out for the new “online” form of item (position 23) to help us with identifying online resources and allowing for easy faceting of searches for online-only material.

Serials

For serials, we’ll once again look at the 008. The type of continuing resource (position 21) will help us identify items as newspaper, periodical or database resources. The form of original item (position 22) and form of item (position 23) will be used to flag information like if the item is microfilm, newspaper, large print or Braille. We’ll also be using information available in the 008 position 25-27 to identify formats such as comics/graphic novels.

Visual Material

Visual material is more complex: we’re dealing with many carriers (with a fast pace of change), and the various types of content that can be delivered on them.

The 007 field will be our primary reference: videorecording format (position 04) provides the carrier (DVD, Blu-ray etc.), which will be supported by checks elsewhere such as 538 $a for specific values. By looking at this data element we can separate DVDs, Blu-rays and VHS videos in the faceted search, which is important if a user doesn’t have a particular player and wishes to filter out certain formats.

Audio Recordings

MARC 21 has some very fine-grained types for sound recordings and music, however, identifying the carrier can be a little tricky because the material designation in 007 contains broad categories.  CD’s for example aren’t listed so we need to look at 007 position 03 to see a speed of 1.4m/s and position 06 for a diameter of 12cm; we’ll also look  at 500 $a and 300 $a. For musical recordings, we’ll be looking in 008 to get the different forms of composition (position 18-19). Position 30-31 will give the work types for literary recordings such as Drama, History, Comedy and Lectures.

Notated Music

Following on from music classification in audio recordings, items that are notated music will have specific data added to our model as well. Format of music (008 position 20) is the primary data element we’ll look at, followed by music parts (position 21) to describe what is included in the score. Target audience and transposition/arrangement (positions 22 and 33) will also be useful when looked at together, for example deriving that a score is a simplified arrangement for younger musicians.

Everything Else

We’ve discussed some formats in detail, but of course there are others, such as maps and computer files. We’ll apply a similar methodology to extracting as much other format information as possible from your records.

We’d love to hear if you have any comments or suggestions on our general approach; if you’d like to give us feedback you can either do it via email to Phil.John@talis.com or by posting a comment here on the blog.

One of the features in the latest Prism 3 preview is new stock searches. I’m going to explain how to perform these searches once we roll out the MarcGrabber update to your system, as well as cover some other additions to the advanced search syntax.

Back in February, Alison explained how any query in Prism 3 can be saved as a prepared search, either by bookmarking or by copying and pasting the URL in your browser address bar. This also holds for new stock searches: you’ll be able to bookmark them, have them on your library website, link to them in emails or even from Facebook.

To prepare a new stock search, all you need to do is perform a search and then add a small snippet of text to the end of the address/URL. To allow you to have very broad sets of items included, we’ve added some new modifiers to the advanced search syntax:

• collection
• genre
• languagecode
• loantype
• location
• language
• subject
• dewey

These can be used just like the current modifiers: append a colon followed by a single word or, if searching for several words, surround them in quotation marks (e.g. subject:"Historical Drama").

If we look at one library who are beta testing the new stock search capability, I can enter a query for all items in their main catalogue by entering collection:"Main Catalogue" in the search box.

When you click on the “Search” button, the URL in the web browser address bar changes to:

http://prism.talis.com/demo/southwark/items?query=collection%3A"Main+Catalogue"

To turn this search into a new stock search just put the following snippet at the end of that URL:

&sort=shelveddate%3Ad&limit=10

This sets the sort order to recent shelved dates first and limits the number of records returned to a single page. The finished URL that you can bookmark/link to etc. now looks like:

http://prism.talis.com/demo/southwark/items?query=collection%3A"Main+Catalogue"&sort=shelveddate%3Ad&limit=10

Finally, you may have noticed in the list of new advanced search modifiers that you will be able to search by Dewey Decimal Classification. Some people have been asking if they can run searches on a sequence of classes; presently we only support searching on a single class, but we are investigating adding this capability in a future release.

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

In November we saw 2,769,129 searches being carried out in Talis Prism 3.

If you have any queries about this or any other aspect of Talis Prism 3, please contact your Account Manager or email Alison Kershaw on alison.kershaw@talis.com.

Firstly, a big thank you to all those that attended our webinar on cross-searching multiple databases, your information was very helpful in directing our future plans for Talis Prism 3.

From your answers and comments we clarified that there are two key things you want to be able to do with Talis Prism, bring in your local collections and integrate with other, larger collections.

Integrating with Larger Collections

Many of you want to be able to direct your users to one or more larger collections such as the British Library or CURL in the event that they can’t find what they need within your collection. In some cases you want to be able to use the information from those collections to generate an ILL request to borrow the material needed.

This is a great thing to do as it supports your users in getting access to the materials they need and helps maintain your catalogue’s position as the starting point for any search.

Historically this has often been done using Z39.50 federated searching, a library-centric solution that predates the web by many years. To replace this functionality in Talis Prism 3 using Z39.50 would be costly and complex. In Talis Prism 2 the same functionality evolved over a period of several years. Doing the same in Talis Prism 3 would be a substantial cost and would only ever give access to the small number of services that have Z39.50 and that we could reliably configure.

A much more common approach today, both for libraries and for other services, is to use the services website directly. On the web generally this is often as simple as a link to the other service. To maintain a more controlled search experience and to allow for the data to be used in ILL requests in future we think it would be better to aim for a more seamless inclusion of those other sites’ searches.

A number of you have a strong desire to search a small number of sites as soon as possible and have your own web developers. This is exactly the kind of demand for extensibility that led us to seed the Juice project and there are already people on the Juice project doing similar things.

So, if you are one of those interested in connecting your users with the British Library, CURL, Library of Congress or Google Books and Amazon then please Join the Juice project, sign up to the Juice Discussion Group where you will find others, including some of us from Talis, taking advantage of Juice.

If you don’t have your own development resource and would like to discuss Talis writing custom extensions for you then please raise that with Alison Kershaw or your account manager.

If you have any specific queries about Juice then email Richard Wallis, coordinator of the Juice project.

Integrating Local Collections not in your LMS

Many of you also have local collections that for a number of reasons are managed outside of your LMS. DS Calm and iBase are common examples and you also talked about electronic serials data. Where the collection, and data about it, are under your ownership and control you expressed that you would like these to appear in Talis Prism searches as part of your whole collection.

In many cases the separation of these parts of your collection has been a side-effect of the tools needed to manage the data and is no longer serving your users well, so bringing this data together will be a good thing. Representing different types of asset within Talis Prism 3 is one of the drivers behind our re-working of the underlying data model and that stream of work will facilitate bringing in other collections in future. Look out for it appearing in future issues of the roadmap as we plan beyond our current horizon.

Our analysis of these collections shows that the detail of how each collection has been configured and how fields have been used is crucial to providing both appropriate indexing and display. This means that when we reach a position where this data could be brought into Talis Prism 3 there will almost certainly be a need for bespoke consultancy. That consultancy is likely to be needed in order to understand what form the data is in, how you’ve used the product locally and how you want those collections to appear in Talis Prism 3.

If you have other local collections, keep an eye on the roadmap and the blog so that when we start looking at this area in detail you know to get involved.

The Talis Prism roadmap is available from the Talis Prism site.

Rob Styles
Technical Lead, Talis Prism 3

University of Bolton library

As we all strive to do the best job possible, the importance of getting feedback from customers is really important. The validation of knowing what we are doing has an impact; and more importantly makes a difference is gratifying for all of us.  That’s why surveying users has always been an important aspect of any library service.  The need to ensure that what is being provided for users of the service is meeting their expectations is an integral part of checking relevancy and satisfaction. Its a way of learning what people want and how things can be improved.

The University of Bolton have recently undergone an extensive refurbishment (and blogged about it) including a new entrance area, self service and they also implemented a new library Catalogue, Talis Prism.  They have asked their users for comments regarding the catalogue, which they have shared with us:-

“The library catalogue is much easier to use now”

“ the new library catalogue is a very welcome improvement making navigation far easier.”

” Library catalogue – is excellent, easily navigated and accurate”
It’s great to see this type of response from users of Talis Prism, have a look at the University of Bolton’s implementation and see for yourself. Also come along to our Talis Prism days to see how Prism can make difference to your users; and to your catalogue.  Of course, not all the comments are completely positive, as the old adage goes, you can’t please all of the people all of the time; but as  Hugh Prather said:-

“Negative feedback is better that none. I would rather have a man hate me than overlook me. As long as he hates me I make a difference.”

An extreme reaction, but I’m sure you get the point.

The easiest way to extend the reach of your Prism is to encourage your users to search it from wherever they are.   Check out the Prism Search Prompt page in the Developer Wiki that gives you and them the html code to do it.

Here are a few examples based upon the Broadminster demonstration tenancy – all you would have to do is change the address used in these examples to that of your tenancy and you will be up and running!

Here are a couple of examples:

In your Blog
Just like this blog, most blog systems allow you to create widgets that contain html.   So why not embed a search prompt for your library catalogue on to your library blog, just like we have done.

In your Browser
The Internet Explorer Web Browsers has a search box that enables you to directly search places such as Google and Wikipedia.  It also enables you to add custom search targets – so why now add one for your local Prism catalogue.
Here are the steps:

1. Go to your Prism tenancy home page and search for ‘TEST’ – without the quotes but yes in uppercase.
2. Select the text in the browser address bar and copy it – it will look something like this:
   http://prism.talis.com/broadminster/searchaction.php?searchTextBox=TEST&searchButton=Search
3. Select ‘Find More Providers…’ from the search menu at the top right of the browser
   
4. Paste the address you copied in to the prompt on the right of the page, enter a name for the search in the prompt below, click the Install button and job done.
   

There are lots more places that you can embed a search prompt, such as your library, council, or university web site.  As the code that is inserted is simple html, the way the prompt appears can be styled to suite the page it is inserted upon.   Loads of possibilities – I would love to hear of your ideas and your experience.