Evergreen 2.9 Release Notes

The progress dialog that is displayed when activating a purchase order now displays more information, particularly during the asset creation phase. It is now also updated in a more linear fashion; making it less likely for it to appear that the activation has stalled.

"Blanket" orders allow staff to invoice an encumbered amount multiple times, paying off the charge over a period of time. The work flow supported by this development assumes staff does not need to track the individual contents of the order, only the amounts encumbered and invoiced in bulk.

There are now commented out examples for custom images to be used when "no image" is present in the catalog for cover art. The included examples are for small/medium/large jacket image art in the event they are not found by the configured Added Content module.

A new Action Trigger event definition ("30 Day Account Expiration Courtesy Notice") for sending alerts to users before their accounts are expired has been added. This is intended to give users time to renew their account before they lose access to library services.

Template Toolkit processors used by Apache are now cached for better performance (by virtue of thereby being able to take advantage of Template Toolkit’s internal caching mechanism). In addition, the compiled versions of the templates themselves can be cached to provide an additional performance boost.

Two Apache virtualhost configuration variables are added to control caching of compiled templates:

As a result of the caching changes, it is now necessary for Evergreen administrators to reload Apache to ensure that a change to (say) TPAC templates becomes visible.

There is now a new column in the Manage Authorities search results. Each result row now displays each authority’s thesaurus value with a "Thes: " prefix. In the authority MARC editor interface the thesaurus value corresponds to the "Subject Heading Thesaurus" fixed field (http://www.loc.gov/marc/authority/ad008.html) labeled “Subj”. For example, a value of "Thes: a" means that the authority is a Library of Congress Subject Heading, and a value of "Thes: k" means the authority is a Canadian Subject Heading.

A Library of Congress list of thesaurus values:

You can now retrieve statistical categories (stat cats) from the MARC record and apply them to the items in Evergreen. When importing or overlaying items through the Vandelay MARC batch import process, edit your Holdings Import Profile to tell Evergreen which subfield contains your stat cat data. That subfield in your MARC records should be formatted like the following:

Notice that the pipe character | is used to separate each category from its value, and two pipes separate each pair of category values.

If you are overlaying existing copies which already have stat cats attached to them, the overlay process will keep those values unless the incoming copies contain updated values for matching categories.

The Z39.50 target at z3950.biblios.net/bibliographic has not worked for years, so its service definition is no longer provided in the seed data for new installations of Evergreen.

Users of existing Evergreen systems should consider removing the Z39.50 definition for ‡biblios.net. This can be done from Admin | Server Administration | Z39.50 Servers in the staff client.

Some vocabularies used (or which could be used) for stock record attributes and coded value maps in Evergreen are published on the web using SKOS. The record attributes system can now associate Linked Data URIs with specific attribute values. In particular, seed data supplying URIs for the RDA Content Type, Media Type, and Carrier Type in this release.

This is an experimental, "under-the-hood" feature that will be built upon in subsuquent releases.

The tag tables for the web staff client MARC editor are now stored in the database rather than a separate XML tooltips file as used by the XUL MARC editor. The tag-table service, which is part of the web staff client sprint 2 preview in this release, has the following features:

The initial seed data for the in-database tag table is derived from the current tooltips XML file.

The web staff client now includes additional functionality to support cataloging and item maintenance, including:

Nearly all of the cataloging functionality available in the XUL staff client is now present in the web staff client with the exception of printing spine labels. Nonetheless, the web staff client remains a preview and is not recommended for production use.

Evergreen sites will now have more control over whether a negative balance can be applied to a user’s billing record and when that negative balance can be applied. Through a series of Library Settings, a site can prohibit negative balances on bills or can allow those negative balances to be applied for a specific period of time after a lost or overdue bill is charged to the user. Sites can set a default for all types of bills or can apply distinct settings for lost bills and for overdue fines. The more specific settings will override the default.

Sites that opt to allow negative balances for a specific period of time must 1) enable the relevant "prohibit negative balances" setting(s) and 2) specify the time period in the relevant Negative Balance Interval setting(s).

In addition to the new library settings, the system now has a new account adjustment payment type. This payment type will be utilized for libraries prohibiting negative balances to replace the previous voiding behavior that caused the negative balances to occur. The account adjustment payment type will also be used for all libraries, regardless of the state of negative balance settings, in cases where overdue fines are adjusted when an overdue item is marked lost.

An Adjust to Zero option has been added to the bills interface of the patron record. This option will always adjust the selected bill to a zero balance. It can also be used to easily clear a negative balance from the patron’s record. A user must have the new ADJUST_BILLS permission to see and use this option.

This new feature also changes the behavior for the client option to void a bill from the patron record. If a user does not have the VOID_BILLING permission, the option to void bills will be hidden in the bills interface and in the Full Details view of a specific bill.

To truly remove the ability to produce negative balances on a transaction, administrators need to 1) enable the relevant setting in the Library Settings Editor and 2) remove the VOID_BILLING permission from staff accounts since manual voiding will continue to produce negative balances.

The Selfcheck interface now warns patrons when they are about to be logged out due to inactivity 20 seconds prior to logging them out.

The inactivity timeout is also reset with each checkout to avoid timeouts while checking out lots of items.

When registering a user, the system checks to see if there are already exiting users with the same name, address, email, etc. Now this duplicate user search includes inactive users so that matches can be re-activated if desired, rather than creating duplicate accounts.

On the catalog’s record summary page, there is now a link for staff that allow them to forcibly clear the cache for the Added Content for that record. This is helpful if the Added Content retrieved the wrong cover jacket art, summary, etc. and caches the wrong result.

In the staff client interface, Google Analytics for the web catalog is now disabled by default. This was a preventive measure to reduce the potential risks for leaking patron information.

In the staff client interface, the Acquisitions Administration menu is now directly accessible from the main "Admin" menu instead of living under "Server Administration". It has also been renamed as "Acquisitions Administration".

The Account Expiration Date has been added to the catalog’s My Account display on the main Account Summary page and the Account Preferences page. This should help patrons with figuring out when their accounts are due to expire before they actually expire.

The Show link in the available copies area of the record summary will now display for any org unit that owns a copy of a particular title, even if all those copies are unavailable. The Show link will not display if a) the copy display is already scoped to that org unit or b) the org unit does not own copies of the title.

The language has also been changed to read "x of y copies available at z library."

Sorting of selected columns is now available in the Items Checked Out, Check Out History, and Holds screens.

For bibliographic records, there is a "bib source" that can be associated with every record. This source is now available as a variable that can be used behind the scenes when customizing the online catalog. The new bib source variables do not present themselves in the catalog display by default.

In the catalog, links to electronic resources now have a link class attribute of "uri_link" to make them easier to customize or build additional services upon.

The deprecated Javascript OPAC interface known as "JSPAC" is no longer included in Evergreen as of this release.

With the understanding that local sites may have made use of existing parts of the old JSPAC interface — especially images and CSS — no attempt is made at upgrade time to automatically remove the existing files from disk.

When upgrading, you may wish to remove "index.xml" from your Apache DirectoryIndex directives.

The following directories, xml, js, and css files were formerly part of JSPAC, and you may be able to safely remove them from your system after verifying that they and their contents are no longer required:

The list of images removed in this change is lengthy, and not included here.

The legacy selfcheck interface is no longer included in Evergreen as of this release.

This interface was formerly located at a URL ending in extras/selfcheck/selfcheck.xml

No attempt is made at upgrade time to automatically remove this interface.

It is recommended that you remove this interface and its associated configuration after performing an upgrade:

(paths relative to Evergreen web root)

You can also remove the related Apache configuration block starting with: