We released a new version of Aspire today.

This release includes a much enhanced My Bookmarks screen. This area of the system was one of the first screens to be implemented around 18 months ago. Feedback from users told us that it was difficult to locate and filter down to a specific bookmark, especially as the user’s bookmark collection grows into the hundreds. The view was not sortable, and although there was a text filter option, it did not operate over criteria such as the author name or the notes that users had added when bookmarking. In addition, the view did not match the visual design of other areas of the system such as My Lists.

The old My Bookmarks screen

This release brings the My Bookmarks screen up to date. We’ve refactored the display into a tabular format. This means users can now sort by Type, Title, Author and Date Added. Searches using the text find filter now apply to all fields displayed (not just the item title) so it’s easy to locate an item by matching text in the personal notes or author fields by just typing the first few letters of the search term – the table filters as you type. In addition, we’ve added an action columns with shortcuts to edit or delete an individual entry.

The new My Bookmarks screen

This release also contains a performance improvement for the modules/schools pages. Customers had reported page timeouts or error messages being displayed intermittently on school or module pages with around 200+ child relationships (e.g. a school associated with more than 200 modules). We identified and fixed a slow running query in this area to resolve the problem and provide a useful performance improvement for all requests to these type of pages, no matter what amount of child relationships they contain.

It’s also worth mentioning a couple of improvements we made last week, but didn’t blog about (as they were small fixes). We improved the item details page to make it more performant and easier to extend in the future, as well as increasing the coverage and execution speed of our test suite to make our release cycle testing faster.

Because Talis Aspire is delivered as SaaS, we continually roll out new features and improvements like these with zero downtime to our customers, usually on a weekly basis.

You can keep up to date with what is coming up next by checking out our In Progress board, which gives insight on what developers are currently working on and what is about to be delivered to the product.

We released a new version of Aspire today.

This release contains a new feature allowing acquisitions librarians to review and export item data by list. From the list outline view, a user can click on the “Review” menu option. They will then enter the review screen, where all items are displayed in a sortable table.

The user can check live availability for items already in the library catalog, sort by importance (and other fields), review library notes input by the academic and export out all the data to CSV for off-line processing.

This screen forms the basis of the review-by-list functionality, however the full workflow is not complete until the User can submit a list for review story is delivered. As you can see from our new In Progress board, as of the 3rd February, this is the next story due to be picked up by development. This will add the ability for an academic to request a review once they have finished editing their list, and for the library acquisitions staff to manage a queue of requests and then notify academics once a review is complete.

We released a new version of Aspire yesterday.

This release contained some detail changes such as hiding help text for input fields under a “Show Help” link (as in the edit item dialog) and also implementing a warning message when users attempt to navigate away from a list in edit mode without saving changes.

We also improved the bookmarking process in Firefox for bringing PDFs into the system – these are now recognised as documents, rather than web pages. Unfortunately, this won’t work on IE, due to the way PDF integration is implemented – our research showed that the Google Bookmarklet and other popular systems suffer from the same issues. A workaround for IE users is to copy the web address of the PDF to their clipboard and use Manual Add from the My Bookmarks screen in Aspire.

This release also included a feature to allow any user to quickly copy resources already in Aspire to their own bookmarks collection – from the full item display page, users can click “Copy to My Bookmarks”. Useful for students keeping track of important resources, or simply for academics browsing existing lists and adding interesting resources to their collection.

Finally, we also made a small change to our linked data API, when requesting resources as RDF the system will now also include details of the other representations that are available, and how to access them.

Happy New Year everyone!

The inevitable and annual routine of back-to-work inbox and tasklist tidy-up alarmingly revealed that the last time I wrote on the blog about a release was the 12th November! This is a great disservice to the development team, who have actually released five new versions of Aspire to our live customers since then.

So to make amends, I’ll take you through the features and improvements they’ve added recently.

Allow a user to edit item metadata

This has been a much-requested feature by customers. Previously, users could only edit resource metadata at the point of creating a bookmark – once the bookmark was saved, the only way of altering the metadata was to delete the original and re-bookmark the resource. This was particularly painful if a user had already included an the resource as an item on one or more lists.

Now, users can click an “edit” link from the item details or bookmark preview screens (shown below):

This opens up an edit screen allowing the user to edit, remove or add new data attributes, as well as create new “part of” relationships to more richly describe the resource.

For convenience, we’ve added a sidebar to this edit screen showing which lists in the system this copy of the resource metadata is used (any changes will affect all of these lists) and also the library availability and purchasing options, if available. Another small but significant tweak here (shown below) is the ability to enter author names either in dual field first name-surname format, or as a single field (more appropriate for corporate authors).

Upgrade of our service provider infrastructure

We’ve upgraded our service provider infrastructure, that previously only supported SAML 2.0 and Shibboleth 2.0 compliant Identity Providers, to a version that supports OpenID, WS-Federation and Shibboleth 1.3 (albeit only for those IDPs that use attribute push).

What all that means is that Talis Aspire will soon be able to support integration with more local authentication and single sign on solutions.

Bookmarking from Aquabrowser OPAC

We’ve extended the bookmarking support, so users can now bookmark bibliographic items from their institution’s Aquabrowser OPAC.

Other small improvements

Under the hood, we’ve improved our linked data API to make the RDF and JSON output of the /items/ and /lists/ URIs less verbose, and we’ve added support for the AIISO type Subject.

We’ve fixed a number of defects, including:

• A validation problem which threw users out of the bookmarking process when adding items direct to a list.
• Javascript dialogs and overlays now scroll if the browser window cannot contain them
• Last updated date now appears on My Lists page
• When exporting a CSV, DOI, ISBN, ISSN and eISSN of the journal now appear if the main item is an article

Because Talis Aspire is delivered as SaaS, we continually roll out new features and improvements like these with zero downtime to our customers, usually on a weekly basis.

With our recent run of Aspire days, I didn’t have time to write about last week’s new release!

We’ve added a new Acquisitions menu option which allows acquisitions staff to run custom queries over Aspire to retrieve resource data to input into their local stock acquisitions processes. Users can build a query by choosing a date range, and then optionally restrict the results by specifying single or multiple item importance or item types.

Once run, the results of the report are displayed in a sortable table (hint: you can sort by multiple columns by clicking on the headings whilst holding down the Shift key). Users can click through the item title to reach the item in situ on the list, on the LCN (Local Control Number) to find the item in the library OPAC, or on the DOI to reach the publisher’s abstract page for eJournals. The importance and note for the library fields give additional inputs into the acquisition process.

Users can export the results at any time by clicking the “Export CSV” button – this will prompt the user’s browser to download a comma separated value file that can be opened (and further processed) in Excel.

Over time, we’ll be building other functions into this menu option over time to assist with stock acquisitions process.

This release also fixes small five defects – the “Unknown type” bug in the browse hierarchy screens, punctuation problems in titles when bookmarking, the last updated date not displaying in My Lists, a bug around invites and the fact that “date added” was not being set when bookmarking directly to a list.

Our Software as a Service architecture means we can continually roll out new features and fixes (like these) to Aspire without downtime or interruption to service. To keep updated with developments, follow the posts on this blog or join one of our webinar events online.

We released a new version of Aspire today.

For quite some time, our most asked for new feature has been the ability to search. Today, we’ve introduced that onto the front page of Talis Aspire, allowing users to more easily locate the lists, modules and even entire courses that are relevant to them.

We’ve tried to make the feature as simple as possible to use – just a simple, google-like search box on the home page of the application. Previously, the front page contained the organisational hierarchy – this is still available to users via a link under the search box, along with a link to the most recent changes which we announced last week.

The system indexes list titles and descriptions, as well as the codes, titles and descriptions of all modules, schools, departments, courses and programmes in the system. Although the feature is simple to use, we’ve paid close attention to usability, implementing a live search results feature which displays up to 10 results as you type, with the most relevant at the top (see below). Clicking on one of the live results takes you straight to the match rather than forcing the user to go via a search results page – this means as users type a course codes, they should see the live results build and refine, click on the course they need to go straight to the course page.

Customers can also embed search functionality (including live search results) into any web page or portal by including the HTML below (this particular snippet searches Talis Aspire at University of Sussex)

<form id="frmHomeSearch" method="get"
  action="http://liblists.sussex.ac.uk/search.html">
 <label for="q">Search</label>
 <input id="q" type="text" name="q" size="50" maxlength="1000"/>
 <input id="btnSearch" type="submit" value="Search"/>
</form>

We’ve also fixed a couple of minor bugs in this release – menu options on the lists page disappearing when the list is re-sorted, and a UI corruption on the bookmarking screen in certain circumstances.

Finally, this release also gives customers the ability to insert custom text into the home page of the application, increasing further the customisation options available to customers to localise the application  – contact us and we’ll advise you how.

We released a new version of Aspire today, which increased the coverage of the journal and library catalogue sites we can automatically extract resource metadata from.

Using a special browser-installed bookmarklet tool, academics can browse the web and pull bibliographic resource metadata into Talis Aspire with just two clicks of a mouse – with no need to re-key. This process already works with literally millions of eJournal articles tagged with a Digital Object Identifier, and thousands upon thousands of items in our customer’s provide to their patrons through their online library catalogues.

Using the tool, academics find a specific item they wish to bookmark, and click on the bookmarklet tool. They are then presented with the automatically extracted metadata and a preview of the item itself (see below).

Click image for full size version

Today, we’ve widened the number of publisher platforms and library OPACs supported by our bookmarklet tool. Previously, academics could bookmark from IngentaConnect, Science Direct, Oxford University Press, Nature Journals, Informaworld and all publishers on the Highwire platform (over 140 scholarly publishers).

We’ve now added support for Wiley Interscience and Springerlink, adding millions more articles to the pool of those that can already be bookmarked.

In addition, customers with Aleph, Innovative and Prism3 OPACs can now automatically import resource metadata using the bookmarklet tool.

If metadata is not automatically recognised, there is always the option to add it manually, however it is our aspiration that 95% of the items academics choose to add to their lists can be added without them manually having to key in data. We continue to monitor our log files to detect popular sites that are being used which we don’t currently automatically extract data from, and are committed to integrating with more sites to ensure that we provide the best possible user experience.

We released a new version of Aspire last Thursday.

This release contains a major part of functionality requested as part of the first phase of publishing and acquisitions workflow – recent changes.

Recent changes allows users to review the latest updates to a given list, or to all lists in the system, either within the system or by receiving notifications via RSS.

At the top of each list, there is a new menu option – “Recent changes”. Clicking on this opens a new screen which displays a sortable table detailing the time and date of the change, the change type and a short description. The image below is from our Broadminster demonstration system, click here to see the live feature in action.

You’ll notice this screen also has the option to subscribe to the RSS feed – useful to receive notification of changes when they happen. An alternative to choosing this option is to click the RSS icon in the address bar for browsers that support this function – the icon will appear on both the main list and recent changes screens.

Although useful for students, library acquisition staff are likely to want to see a screen that summarises changes across all lists, rather than subscribe or review the feeds for all the lists in the system individually. So, we’ve implemented a version of this feature that groups the changes for all tenancies.

As well as the option to subscribe to this feed by RSS and receive notifications of updates across the system as they occur, this screen has an additional column which contains a hyperlink to the list that’s been changed. Acquisition staff can use this to quickly navigate to the list and export the list item data in CSV format in order to get the latest data that’s been added.

Building on the recent changes functionality, imminent future releases will contain a custom query tool which will allow acquisitions staff to export newly added data across all lists based on user-defined criteria, completing the first phase of our acquisitions workflow stories.

An essential part of our ethos for customers working with Talis Aspire is not just a great implementation, but working with them to ensure they succeed once it is up and running. One of the essential ingredients to this is helping academics to engage with the solution.

Now, there are many different strands to this. One aspect is the design of the product itself – it needs to be easy for the academic to use, to fit in with how different academics choose to work, and to genuinely save the academic time over their existing practices. Another aspect is the role the liaison librarian team play in introducing academics to Aspire, demonstrating these benefits and helping academics get started on building and maintaining their lists.

I spend a lot of time talking to users, and listening to their experiences. One difficulty that academics were having, which in turn impacted on the work liaison librarians have been conducting, was getting started with Talis Aspire. This was seen in two ways – firstly, installing the bookmarklet tool and secondly, once the bookmarklet had been installed, what to do next?

It was a while back that we tackled the first of these – putting the bookmarklet installation tutorial onto the “My Bookmarks” page, and including some 20-second videos. The second problem was a bit more difficult. We wanted to provide something to introduce the concepts around Aspire, such as find-collect-organise, in a no nonsense way. We wanted to give academics a sense of how to navigate Talis Aspire, and what they could do where. And we wanted to recognise that, like everyone, academics just want to “get started as quick as possible”.

Working closely with our in-house experts, we have now put together a “Take the tour” video for Aspire which you can watch below.

Note: You can view the video full-screen by using the button located next to the volume control of the video player above. Alternatively, you can distribute this link – http://talis-aspire.s3.amazonaws.com/videos/talis_aspire_take_the_tour.mp4.

We believe this video will become an important tool to ensure academics new to Talis Aspire are able to start building their first lists as quick as possible. Early trials with it have been positively received so I’ve now including the video above for everyone to provide feedback on, make suggestions, and start using yourselves to help users at your institution. I’m particular interested to find out more about how you see this video being provided to academics – would you email them a link, should it be within Aspire, or something else?

As always, leave your comments below or get in touch with me direct. Looking forward to hearing from everyone!

We released a new version of Aspire today.

Building on recent releases that have added the ability for academics to indicate “importance” and purchase suggestion notes on items, this release adds the ability to export item data out of Aspire to integrate with local library acquisitions workflow.

On the top of each list, you’ll see a new option “Export to CSV”. Clicking it will download a comma separated value (CSV) file that can be imported straight into Excel or any other spreadsheet application.

Once in your spreadsheet application, you can filter on all the column fields such as “Type”, “Importance” and a new field, “Date added”. With this release, we are now storing the date when new items are added to the list. This allows you to sort and see which are the most recently added items.

We don’t show all the bibliographic data in the export file – only the item title and identifiers (ISBN, ISSN, catalog number and DOI) are shown. This is to reduce the bloat and size of the dataset. However, we do provide a hyperlink that users can click on from the spreadsheet to view the item in situ in the system. This will also show the catalog availability and a full set of metadata.

All users can export lists, however only those who are logged in with the relevant permissions will be able to export the “library notes” field which contains information required to support purchase decisions.

This release also contains a bug fix addressing a defect for users with very large collections of bookmarks.

As Talis Aspire is delivered as Software as a Service, we can continually roll out new features, improvements and fixes as they are developed.