• Talis Services
• Talis Support
• Contact
• Knowledgebase
• Talis Solutions
• Documentation
• FAQs
• Virus Service
• Newsletters
• Resources
• Project Management
• Deployment
• Talis Live Services
• Service Level Agreement
• Talis Education
• Courses
• Talis Consulting
• Lyra Programme
• Conversion
• Completion
• Background
• Webinars
• Talis Assist

The Lyra Programme: Re-shaping Bibliographic Management

The Lyra Programme is about reshaping bibliographic management. Primarily, this means changing cataloguing and the catalogue. We aim to provide more control for the cataloguer over the quality of records by remodelling the cataloguing workflow and aligning it with prevailing standards, whilst ensuring the cataloguer is unimpeded by the system. We are also re-engineering retrieval functionality in the local catalogue to provide real-time indexing and search facilities that are powerful, configurable and easy to use.

The Lyra Programme is standards-based whilst drawing on analysis of real-life business processes. This ensures your investment in Talis Systems is protected as they become more extensible, adaptable and interoperable with other systems.

Formats and identifiers

The Lyra Programme will deliver support for the MARC 21 Bibliographic and Authorities formats. These will be at the heart of cataloguing and authority control in Talis Alto, as well as driving indexing and searching for Talis Prism. The full MARC 21 repertoire of characters will be supported using Unicode. This will provide for a wide range of non-Latin scripts and special characters that you can edit in Talis Alto Cataloguing and display to users in Talis Prism.

The ISBN is changing to 13 digits. The Lyra Programme will support this as well as the historic 10-digit ISBNs, in line with the Guidelines of the International ISBN Agency.

System and control numbers

The Lyra Programme introduces a major new departure to the existing version of system control numbers. Every record will have its own local system control number. ISBNs and other standard numbers will be treated as additional access points and held in their designated MARC fields. This will eliminate the problems associated with the concept of ‘link numbers' and gives the cataloguer full control over the definition of any particular record, unencumbered by publishers' assignment of ISBNs, ISSNs, or other standard identifiers. This also impacts on workflow and record matching, bringing further beneficial changes.

Protocols and profiles

Search and retrieval of bibliographic data from remote databases (such as Talis Base and other library catalogues) and from the local catalogue to remote clients, will be based on the Z39.50 standard protocol.

Profiles are a means of specifying agreed options and methods for implementing standards. The Bath Profile and the US National Profile define search types to be supported by Z39.50 targets, and are designed to improve consistency and search success rates for users (especially when searching across multiple targets). The Lyra Programme will provide a high degree of compliance with both these profiles.

Also within the scope of the Lyra Programme is support for the extended Z39.50 service that allows dynamic holdings and availability information to be retrieved. This is important for remote clients in resource sharing contexts.