We are pleased to announce that Alto 5.8 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 5.8 are:

• Interloan requests to the British Library’s BLDSS system can now be sent using Web Services, rather than ARTEmail.
• There is a new Borrower Notification rule type for informing borrowers that their reservation has been cancelled.
• A number of defects have been fixed throughout Alto.
• Authority and bibliographic MARC description files have been amended to include the latest MARC format updates.
• There are improved warnings in Circulation around issuing and renewing to borrowers whose registration has expired, and issuing to dates in the past.
• Obsolete ILL report codes can now be suppressed.

New versions of Assure and MarcService are included in this release and a new version of Local Data Services (LDS), version 2.1, is also available, which supports the new Borrower Notifications rule and the use of the new Inter-library loan functionality.  Please raise a support request to arrange your LDS upgrade.