by The beta release of Evergreen 2.8 is available to download and test!
New features and enhancements of note in Evergreen 2.8 include:
- Acquisitions improvements to help prevent the creation of duplicate orders and duplicate purchase order names.
- In the select list and PO view interfaces, beside the line item ID, the number of catalog copies already owned is now displayed.
- A new Apache access handler that allows resources on an Evergreen webs server, or which are proxied via an Evergreen web server, to be authenticated using user’s Evergreen credentials.
- Copy locations can now be marked as deleted. This allows information about disused copy locations to be retained for reporting purposes without cluttering up location selection drop-downs.
- Support for matching authority records during MARC import. Matches can be made against MARC tag/subfield entries and against a record’s normalized heading and thesaurus.
- Patron message center: a new mechanism via which messages can be sent to patrons for them to read while logged into the public catalog.
- A new option to stop billing activity on zero-balance billed transaction, which will help reduce the incidence of patron accounts with negative balances.
- New options to void lost item and long overdue billings if a loan is marked as claims returned.
- The staff interface for placing holds now offers the ability to place additional holds on the same title.
- The active date of a copy record is now displayed more clearly.
- A number of enhancements have been made to the public catalog to better support discoverability by web search engines.
- There is now a direct link to “My Lists” from the “My Account” area in the top upper-right part of the public catalog.
- There is a new option for TPAC to show more details by default.
For more information about what’s in the release, check out the draft release notes.
Note that the release was built yesterday before 2.7.4 existed, so the DB upgrade script applies to a 2.7.3 database. To apply to a 2.7.4 test database, remove updates 0908, 0913, and 0914 from the upgrade file, retaining the final commit. The final 2.8.0 DB upgrade script will be built from 2.7.4 instead.