by The Evergreen community is pleased to announce the beta release of Evergreen 2.12 and the beta release of OpenSRF 2.5. The releases are available for download and testing from the Evergreen downloads page and from the OpenSRF downloads page. Testers must upgrade to OpenSRF 2.5 to test Evergreen 2.12.
This release includes the implementation of acquisitions and booking in the new web staff client in addition to many web client bug fixes for circulation, cataloging, administration and reports. We strongly encourage libraries to start using the web client on a trial basis in production. All functionality is available for testing with the exception of serials and offline circulation.
Other notable new features and enhancements for 2.12 include:
- Overdrive and OneClickdigital integration. When configured, patrons will be able to see ebook availability in search results and on the record summary page. They will also see ebook checkouts and holds in My Account.
- Improvements to metarecords that include:
- improvements to the bibliographic fingerprint to prevent the system from grouping different parts of a work together and to better distinguish between the title and author in the fingerprint;
- the ability to limit the “Group Formats & Editions” search by format or other limiters;
- improvements to the retrieval of e-resources in a “Group Formats & Editions” search;
- and the ability to jump to other formats and editions of a work directly from the record summary page.
- The removal of advanced search limiters from the basic search box, with a new widget added to the sidebar where users can see and remove those limiters.
- A change to topic, geographic and temporal subject browse indexes that will display the entire heading as a unit rather than displaying individual subject terms separately.
- Support for right-to-left languages, such as Arabic, in the public catalog. Arabic has also become a new officially-supported language in Evergreen.
- A new hold targeting service supporting new targeting options and runtime optimizations to speed up targeting.
- In the web staff client, the ability to apply merge profiles in the record bucket merge and Z39.50 interfaces.
- The ability to display copy alerts when recording in-house use.
- The ability to ignore punctuation, such as hyphens and apostrophes, when performing patron searches.
- Support for recognition of client time zones, particularly useful for consortia spanning time zones.
With release 2.12, minimum requirements for Evergreen have increased to PostgreSQL 9.3 and OpenSRF 2.5
For more information about what will be available in the release, check out the draft release notes.
Many thanks to all of the developers, testers, documentors, translators, funders and other contributors who helped make this release happen.