PaILS is happy to announce that we will be upgrading SPARK to Evergreen version 2.9 later this year. The test environment will be upgraded on Nov. 11 and the production server will be upgraded on December 17. I will be in touch with more information about webinars and other information pertaining to the upgrade. Here’s the description of the improvements and enhancements that will come with v2.9
- Evergreen now supports placing blanket orders, allowing staff to invoice an encumbered amount multiple times, paying off the charge over a period of time.
- There is now better reporting of progress when a purchase order is activated.
- The Acquisitions Administration menu in the staff client is now directly accessible from the main “Admin” menu.
- There is now an action/trigger event definition for sending alerts to users before their accounts are scheduled to expire.
- When registering a new user, the duplicate record search now includes inactive users.
- Evergreen now offers more options for controlling whether and when users can carry negative balances on their account.
- The web-based self-check interface now warns the user if their session is about to expire.
- The “Manage Authorities” results list now displays the thesaurus associated with each authority record.
- Item statistical categories can now be set during record import.
- The web staff interface preview now includes cataloging functionality, including a new MARC editor, Z39.50 record import, and a new volume/copy editor.
- The account expiration date is now displayed on the user’s “My Account” page in the public catalog.
- Users can now sort their lists of items checked out, check out history, and holds when logged into the public catalog.
- The bibliographic record source is now available for use by public catalog templates.
- The public catalog can now cache Template Toolkit templates, improving its speed.
- On the catalog’s record summary page, there is now a link to allow staff to to forcibly clear the cache of added content for that record.
- Google Analytics (if enabled at all) is now disabled in the staff client.
- Several deprecated parts of the code have been removed, including script-based circulation policies, the open-ils.penalty service, the legacy self-check interface, and the old “JSPAC” public catalog interface.