Welcome to the summer! I realize it’s a busy time for you folks in the public libraries (with Summer Reading and all), and I appreciate the time you take to keep up with the Evergreen project.
As usual, work on Evergreen is proceeding on schedule, and we expect a solid Alpha release in July. The Alpha release will contain many new critical features, as well as improvement and refinement of features that have been released previously. Here are some highlights:
- A feature-rich and patron-friendly OPAC; it will have an expanded with a “MyOPAC” section, that allows patrons to update their passwords, check on their current loans, place holds, etc. We are exploring the idea of expanding the MyOPAC to handle credit card payments in a later release.
- Holds functionality, supported by a powerful and flexible holds matrix. This allows central PINES administration to configure the system to conform to current PINES policy, as well as to have great flexibilty to support any possible future PINES policy changes.
- Billing and fines functionality. The ability to interface with collection agencies will come this Fall.
- Renewals and other minor circulation enhancements will be included in this release.
- z39.50 importing.
One other thing I wanted to bring to your attention is a side-project that Mike has undertaken. Mike talks in-depth about it in this blog entry, but it is basically a powerful and flexible federated search interface. You can take a look at it and give it a test run here.
That’s it for now from here. See ya’ll at the Alpha release.