We are pleased to announce that Alto 5.7 is now available on general release to all customers.

You will find the release notices and supporting documentation for this release on the MySupport portal.

Please ensure that you download and read the relevant documentation for your operating system prior to downloading the installation package.

Key features within Alto 5.7 are:

•     Sybase 16 is now supported
•     Scottish libraries no longer require a separate version of Alto in order to use the NEC smartcard
•     The Status field on item forms and lists now shows ‘On Loan’ or ‘In Transit’ when appropriate
•     It is now possible to set more than 255 location profiles and other values held in the TYPE_STATUS table
•    A new script allows the item ‘last seen’ date to be populated
•     Additional parameters have been added to Borrower Notifications for auto-renewal and borrower information notifications
•     A number of defects have been fixed
•     Authority and bibliographic MARC description files have been amended to include the latest MARC format updates.

New versions of Assure and MarcService are included in this release and a new version of Local Data Services (LDS), version 1.9, is also available.  Although Alto 5.7 will still work with LDS 1.8, the new version supports the new auto-renewal features in Borrower Notifications and many features within Soprano. Please raise a support request to arrange your LDS upgrade.