We’re pleased to announce that the next release of Soprano is now available for preview.

This release includes:

• Purchasing
  • Navigation
  • Invoice changes
  • Reservation alerts
  • Item Type on Order Items
  • Donations
  • Undo Receipt
  • Split subscription between multiple funds
  • Adjust Allocation
  • Purchasing fixes
• General
  • Re-styled footer: release notes, LDS version & report an incident
  • General fixes
• Circulation
  • Pick and Supply workflow
  • Borrower look-up in Issue and Reserve
  • Barcode validation in Create Borrower
  • Guarantor barcode check in Create Borrower
  • Borrower former barcode numbers
  • Borrower Interests and Analyses suppressed when no list of values
  • Renewals and renewing on Borrower Loans
  • Display the value of an Item
  • Circulation fixes

Purchasing

Navigation

If you move out of Purchasing to another area of Soprano, when you go back to Purchasing you will be taken to the sub-menu option you were previously in rather than to Orders by default.

 

Invoice changes

When you create an invoice there are additional fields for Net Amount (i.e. the amount payable minus tax) and VAT, which must be completed.

The amounts entered display in the totals section on the invoice page.

When you click the Add Invoice Line button, which requires Local Data Services (LDS) version 2.8.5 or higher, you see a reduced number of fields.

Data must be entered into each of the fields. Your Price should include discount, if any, and VAT should be entered as an amount or 0.00. There is an Add Invoice Charge button for adding charges. Net Amount is the invoice line total without tax and Amount Payable the total including any tax.

Please note: invoice lines for part orders (i.e. where the number of items invoiced is less than the number of items on the order) can be entered but they will produce an error when you try to pay the invoice.

When an invoice line displays, calculated values are in italics and a hyphen indicates that a value is not present in the database or cannot be calculated.

Soprano now warns you if there are cancelled or unreceipted items linked to an invoice.  When you display an existing invoice or add lines to a new invoice you will see the message ‘Checking invoice …’ next to the invoice totals, then an information box showing the results of the check.

 

Reservation alerts

You can now see if there are active or not yet effective reservations against the title on an order.

Clicking the button takes you to the Reservations tab for the work.

If the environment variable TAL_RES_ADD_ITEMS is set to YES, an item will be linked to existing reservations if appropriate when it is receipted. Please note that this is regardless of the status that the item is receipted to. If you receipt an item in Orders you can click the Item is reserved link to move to the Item page.

If the item is at Received status you will need to change its status to In Stock/Loanable to see the Process Reservation button.

 

Item Type on Order Items

There is a new Type column on the list of items on an order.

The column will be populated when you have LDS version 2.8.5 or higher.

 

Donations

When you add a new item there is now the option to record it as a donation.

This adds the message ‘Created as a donation’ to the item.

 

Undo Receipt

You can now unreceipt items at statuses other than Receipted provided they are not on loan or in transit and you are enabled to receipt items.  The Undo Receipt button displays on the Order and Item pages and when an item is receipted in Receipt Items.

 

Split subscription between multiple funds

You can now split the cost of an Open Order subscription between two or more funds.

 

Adjust Allocation

The Add Money and Transfer Money buttons on the fund page have been replaced by a single Adjust Allocation button

Clicking this brings up a new look Transfer page with the current fund in the Destination Fund field and a button for switching to the Add page.

 

Purchasing fixes

Display of funds on an order. Funds now display correctly when there are several copies on an order, each linked to a different fund the linked to different funds. Previously all the funds appeared against each copy with varying percentages.

Serials displaying as monographs. Some electronic resources previously displayed as monographs rather than serials with the result that the Orders tab displayed rather than Open Orders and the Add Item and Order Copies buttons appeared. These resources now display correctly.

Edit Order Supplier permission. The pencil control no longer displays on the Supplier page if you don’t have permission to edit a supplier.

Find a work to order. If you paste a standard identifier into the Search field, you no longer have to press Enter to initiate the search.

Official order number. When you click on the official order number in an order to retrieve all the orders with this number, the Order State filter is now set to All rather than Active and the search term is put in quotation marks.

Receipting in Resources. Previously an error message displayed when a user not enabled for Purchasing receipted an item in Resources, even though the receipt was successful. This has been fixed.

 

 

General

Re-styled footer: release notes, LDS version & report an incident

The footer elements are now displayed with more space in a horizontal arrangement under a line.

A new Release notes link takes you to the Soprano blog where you can read the latest and earlier release notices, so you don’t need to remember or save the link anywhere else.

A Request ID is displayed with a different value (a string of numbers and letters) on each page. This may be useful to give to Support when raising a case about an issue with Soprano.

Additionally, if you have the Utilities enablements, typically as a system manager, you will see the LDS version number and a notice about whether or not it is up to date – this is instead of a link to see the same information on a separate page. You will also see a Report an incident link, which generates an email in your email client to Capita Libraries Support with a subject line giving the Soprano page request number and the URL, and the beginning of a message giving your user name and the date and time. This allows you to raise or add to support cases by sending us details of an example of the problem.

 

General fixes

Search targets. BDSAllM21, LCAllM21 and NLMAllM21 are now being searched correctly when they are included in your list of Base search targets (specified in Cat. Auto Search Order in SetConfig).

Viewing Soprano on large monitors. We have adjusted the scaling of Soprano on extra wide screens (it changes when the window is greater than 1600px wide) to make sure text is readable on larger monitors.

Faceting on terms with non-alphanumeric characters. This fixes a problem where faceting was only using part of the selected term when it included some non-alphanumeric characters such as ampersand.

Navigate to Work Holdings as default. When you navigate to a Work from a borrower’s reservation the Work Holdings tab is now open by default instead of the Information tab.

Add Item fixed. We’ve fixed a problem in Soprano that was preventing items from being created. However, the problem may persist due to an issue in some recent versions of the Local Data Services that will be fixed in the next release (LDS 2.8.6).

Work Format: Book, PaperBack, Hardback. Soprano now assigns the correct format out of Book, Paperback and Hardback, depending on format designations found in ISBN fields in the MARC record.

Serial Holdings Summary completeness. In the Work header for a serial, all of the summary holdings statements for the current or selected site are now shown when there are more than one, rather than just one of them.

 

 

Circulation

Pick and Supply workflow

We have extended the workflow for picking and supplying items for reservations or stock rotation to include a step to deal with items not found, and we have added elements to connect the stages of the workflow into a cohesive whole.

The pages for each of the three workflow steps has a workflow line at the top, showing the steps in the workflow. The first step is either Pick Reservations or Pick Stock Rotations. The other two steps are Process Items and Process Unfound. You can click/tap a step in the line to move to the page for the selected step. There are also buttons at the foot of each page allowing you to move forward or back one step.

Information from each step is passed along the workflow. The Process Items page now has a count of picked items, which decrements with each item processed. The items shown in the new Process Unfound page are selected by deduction from the activity performed in the preceding two steps. The Pick List and the activity information stored from it is retained until you generate a fresh one of the same type from the Home page.

In the Pick Reservations list the Last Seen date of each available copy is displayed in the Next Location column. If it is recent then the item may be in a returns bin if not on the shelf.

The Unfound Items page lists individual items that were deemed available in the Pick List when:

• A request (i.e. a row in the Pick List) has been ignored (no button pressed in the Pick List and no item supplied (transited or satisfied) in Process Reservations).
• A request has been skipped (the Skip button was pressed in Pick Reservations)
• The Found button in the Pick List has been pressed on a request, but fewer times than the Required and Available counts – then all locally available items attached to the work are listed
• The number of items supplied for a title in Process Reservations is fewer than the Required and Available counts in the Pick List.

The Pick reserved items task is now available in Offline mode, when you already have a pick list in progress. This means that if you leave the pick list and subsequently when without connectivity you want to return to it, you can.

 

Borrower look-up in Issue and Reserve

In addition to barcodes, the Borrower input box in the Issue and Reserve pages now accepts non-barcode input and gives a list of search results in context. This means that if you don’t have the borrower’s barcode to scan, you can look them up using any of the criteria available in borrower search, including name, date of birth, email address, postcode or institution ID. A single match populates the field immediately; multiple matches display in a drop down selection list showing up to the first eight results, with a link giving you the option to view all results in the dedicated borrower search results page.

 

Barcode validation in Create Borrower

In the Create Borrower form the barcode you enter is now validated against your local validation rules when you submit the form. If the barcode is invalid then you get an error message overlay.

 

Guarantor barcode check in Create Borrower

In Create Borrower, if you enter a barcode in the Guarantor field that does not match a borrower, rather than getting a general error when you submit the form you now get an overlay error message telling you that ‘The guarantor barcode provided is not registered in the database’.

 

Borrower former barcode numbers

When you change a borrower’s number (by editing it in the borrower header form) the old number is now kept in the database and it remains searchable. When you search using a former number it finds the borrower and displays an amber alert banner at the top of the borrower page saying ‘This borrower was accessed using an out of date barcode {number}’.

In the borrower input field in Reserve Work and Issue Item you can enter a former number and the correct borrower (showing their current number) is displayed.

 

Borrower Interests and Analyses suppressed when no list of values

If your library has no values configured for Borrower Interest or Analysis then, in Borrower > Information, the corresponding Interests or Analyses field is not displayed.

 

Renewals and renewing on Borrower Loans

In order to display accurately labelled information we’ve changed the way seen and unseen renewals are presented and actioned in the Borrower Loans page. We’ve removed the Renew As Seen check box, which determined both the type of renewal performed by the Renew Selected button and the tally and limit displayed, because the tally and limit for the Seen setting actually relate to the total renewals. Now, you have buttons to Renew or Renew As Unseen, which apply to any loans marked as selected, and two columns for renewal information, Total and Unseen, each giving the tally and limit. When a tally equals or exceeds its limit then an amber label stating Max. reached is displayed.

 

Display the value of an Item

When the value of an Item’s Value field is greater than zero it now displays in the Item Header, helping you with charging a customer when they lose an item.

 

Release Procedure

 To preview this release

You can preview this release by inserting ‘-demo’ into your tenancy URL after the word ‘soprano’: https://soprano-demo.librarymanagementcloud.co.uk/{your tenancy name}. Please remember that it accesses your live data.

 

We’re pleased to announce that the version of Soprano that has been in preview recently was released to the live service yesterday, 29th August.

Details of the inclusions are given in the release notice on the Soprano blog.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch. You can comment here on the Soprano blog, on the Soprano forum and Soprano Ideas or contact your Account Manager or the Soprano team directly.

If you were unable to attend the Soprano Development Update webinar on Thursday 17th August or would like to review what we covered then you can catch up on the latest developments by watching the video of the webinar, below, or by downloading it.

The webinar demonstrates and discusses some of the developments included in the release that is now available for preview.

We’re pleased to announce that the next release of Soprano is now available for preview.
This release includes:

• Purchasing
  • Searching for a work to order
  • Searching for orders on the Orders page
  • Order State filter
  • Order notes and instructions
  • Open Order improvements
  • Aggregate funds
  • Funds summary
  • Other fund improvements
  • Supplier improvements
  • Purchasing fixes
• General
  • Item state information
  • Edit item barcode and shelfmark
  • Home site and shelfmark together in item header
  • Work and Item action buttons re-organised
  • Retaining your last search
  • Serial holdings summary
  • Name only in menus
  • ‘Update in progress’ indicator
  • LDS up-to-date check
• Circulation
  • Quick navigation between circulation tasks
  • Remove item from reservation shelf
  • Borrower search prompt text
  • Borrower email address validation
  • Create Borrower with no Department
  • Borrower reservation in transit
  • Circulation fixes

 

Purchasing

Searching for a work to order

When you click the Create Order button on the Orders page you have the option to search the local database and Base for a work to order or to create a work.  Improvements have been made to the search function so you can now search using keywords as an alternative to a standard identifier and in both cases get a set of records to choose from. Up to five records from the local database and ten records from Base will be displayed.

A keyword search needs to be as specific as possible for the best results.

Clicking the Select button on a local record or the Import button on a Base record brings up the Create Order form.

 

Searching for orders on the Orders page

Searching for orders has been improved so you can now

• Search for an official order number without having to use the ‘official’ qualifier
• Search by ISBN or other standard identifier
• Enter a partial order number or other reference number

• Carry out a keyword search.This retrieves the same records as a search in Resources, then displays the orders linked to the first record found so may be useful for exact title searches.

 

Order State filter

Complete has been added to the Filter by Order State list in Orders.

 

Order notes and instructions

You can now edit the Notes and Supplier Instructions fields on the Notes tab of an order.

 

Open Order improvements

There is a new Create Open Order button next to the search box on the Open Orders page.

Clicking this takes you to the Begin ordering page where you can search for a work or create one.

 

Aggregate funds

Base and Aggregate buttons have been added to the Create Fund form so that an aggregate fund can be created.

Clicking the Aggregate button brings up a field that enables member funds to be selected from a list. Currently only base funds can be added as members.

Member funds can be added and removed on the Members tab of an existing fund.

The Add Money and Transfer Money buttons no longer display on an aggregate fund and the list of funds you see when you click Add Money on a base fund no longer includes aggregates.

 

Funds summary

The new Funds Summary tab brings up a dashboard of fund information for the current financial year.

Charts on the left of the screen give overviews of spending and usage. On the right there are lists of funds based on levels of expenditure and options for selecting funds.

If funds are selected, they display in a list on the left of the screen, which can be sorted and searched.

Clicking on a fund in the list takes you to the fund record.

 

 

Other fund improvements

A fund’s name, expenditure code and notes can now be edited. Select the pencil control in the record header to bring up the edit form.

When money is transferred into or out of a fund, the commitment and expenditure limits are now adjusted automatically.

A Financial Year filter has been added to Funds. This displays the three most recent financial years specified in the database and defaults to the latest year.

 

Supplier improvements

The status of a supplier is now changed using a button rather than by editing the record.  This screenshot shows the buttons for making a closed supplier Active or Inactive.

The account code used by finance integration now displays on the Supplier page and is editable.

 

Purchasing fixes

Permission to cancel an order. The Cancel button no longer displays if you don’t have permission to edit orders.

Error on confirming an order. An error message now displays if required when you confirm an order on the list of orders. Previously the Confirm button disappeared without giving a message.

Receipting an order for an inactive supplier. This now displays a meaningful error message.

 

 

General

Item state information

More use is now made of the area in the item header between the description panel and the action buttons to give information about the state of the item, so that you can see at a glance anything that might affect what you do with the item. Exceptions are given in red or amber, replacing icons on the top left corner of the item cover image; other conditions are given in blue, as already seen for cases such as in transit. Item state information covers conditions such as: on loan, overdue, reserved, on the reservation shelf, has message/s (with a count of messages and a link to view them), Has Query (now amber rather than blue), in transit, rotation due, and has inter-library loan.

Where it’s helpful and feasible, some detail is included in the label indicating a particular condition. Cases include: a single reservation – the collection site name is given; the item is on the reservation shelf – the expiry date is given; a query – the reason is given; in transit – the destination site name is given. The full text of one forced message is displayed.

Item state alert icons are also given in the Item Description column in outcome rows for Issue, Renew and Return, where appropriate.

 

Edit item barcode and shelfmark

The barcode and the four elements of the shelfmark (Sequence, Size, Class and Suffix) are now included on the item edit form. The shelfmark fields require a forthcoming version of the Local Data Services (LDS).

This allows you to change the barcode number, for example when you’ve had to replace an unreadable barcode, and to change the shelfmark, for example to add one, to change a default, to correct an error or to reflect a move.

In the shelfmark you can select values (or leave no value) for Sequence and Size from menus of your defined values. In the Class number field when you type three or more characters an autocomplete list appears showing existing classification numbers beginning with your string, to help with consistent application of class numbers and so that you know when you add a new classification number to your library.

 

Home site and shelfmark together in item header

The shelfmark is now displayed following the home site in the item header.

 

Work and Item action buttons re-organised

The action buttons on the right of the header of entities such as works, items, funds and suppliers are now organised into groups with labels describing the areas they relate to. Button colour now serves to indicate main and other actions.

 

Retaining your last search

When your resources search query retrieves more than one result, Soprano now retains the query. When you select the Resources tab, instead of getting the Resources front page with Recent Activity, it re-plays your last search query giving you the first page of results with the query in the search box. This supports use cases where you want to act on more than one result from the same query, such as reserving similar works.

A new X button at the end of the search box allows you to clear the box and results, giving you the Recent Activity page with the cursor in the search box ready for your next query. The same can be done by selecting the Resources tab again. Alternatively you can remove the old query ‘manually’ and type a new query in the search box.

 

Serial holdings summary

 

 

 

Borrower email address validation

Email address input is now validated in Create Borrower and in Borrower > Information > Contacts. In the Borrower Create form if you enter an invalid email address then, on leaving the field, you are advised in red to ‘Please enter a valid email address’:

In Borrower > Information > Contacts when you add or update an email address if you enter an invalid address then when you save the change you get a lightbox overlay advising you to ‘Please enter a valid email address’:

 

 

Borrower reservation in transit

We’re pleased to announce that the version of Soprano that has been in preview recently has now been released to the live service.

Details of the inclusions are given in the release notice on the Soprano blog.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch. You can comment here on the Soprano blog, on the Soprano forum and Soprano Ideas or contact your Account Manager or the Soprano team directly.

We’re pleased to announce that the next release of Soprano is now available for preview.

This release addresses issues relating to Borrower Date of Birth.

Date of Birth field on/off toggle in Create & Edit Borrower

You can now create a borrower without setting a date of birth. A new toggle switch next to the Date of Birth field is set on by default. When you click/tap to switch it off, the value selection fields disappear and you can save the form without a date of birth.

In the Borrower Header if there is no date of birth the field value displays as ‘[unknown]’.

The new toggle switch is also given In the Borrower Header edit form. If there is no date of birth the toggle is Off and the date fields are not displayed; click/tap to switch it on to display the fields and set a date of birth.

If there is a date of birth the toggle is set on and the date fields are displayed; if you click/tap to switch it off and save the form then the date of birth is removed from the borrower.

 

Edit borrower no longer setting spurious DoB

Borrower records where there is no date of birth now retain no value for the Date of Birth when you edit some other data in the borrower record, rather than setting it to the current date.

 

Release to the live service

This version of Soprano will be released to the live service on Tuesday 4th July 2017.

 

Comments and contact

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch. You can comment here on the blog, in the Soprano Forum, or contact your Account Manager. To suggest and discuss additional features there is the Soprano Ideas Forum.

 

We’re pleased to announce that the version of Soprano that has been in preview recently has now been released to the live service.

Details of the inclusions are given in the release notice on the Soprano blog.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch. You can comment here on the Soprano blog, on the Soprano forum and Soprano Ideas or contact your Account Manager or the Soprano team directly.

We’re pleased to announce that the next release of Soprano is now available for preview.
This release includes:

• General
  • Search results – more detail
• Purchasing
  • Viewing the orders for a work
  • Improvements to the Create Order form
  • Copying an order
  • Order State Filter
  • Supplier reports
  • Order notes
  • Navigating from orders to invoices
  • Receipting improvements
  • Cancelling items on a part received order
  • Shelfmark in Orders
  • New messages when invoice payment or order confirmation fails
  • Last edit information
  • Improvements to the Create Open Order form
  • Deleting an invoice
  • Funds improvements
  • Change the work on an order
  • Claim missing issues for Open Orders
  • Purchasing fixes
• Circulation
  • Borrower Loans display more information
  • Item sets
  • Circulation fixes
• Cataloguing fix
• Operator Profile – View your permissions
• Tills fixes

 

General

Search results – more detail

Soprano now gives more detail in search results for Resources,  and also in the Recent Activity list. More of the title is displayed with longer titles wrapping over two lines, and edition statements are displayed. Labels are given for the elements after title and authors, for clarity. There is also a concise availability statement giving the site and shelfmark for one site, with preference for the current site, where there is at least one available copy.

Purchasing

Viewing the orders for a work

You can now see the orders for a work on a new Orders tab. You can click on an order in the list to display the full record in Orders.

Alternatively you can click the View In Purchasing button, which carries out a search in Orders on the bib ID of the work.

 

Improvements to the Create Order form

The following fields have been added to the Create Order form:

• Currency
• Notes
• Order type
• Supplier instructions

You can now order copies for multiple sites and split the cost between funds if required. When you select a fund the amount available to spend is displayed.

 

Copying an order

A Copy This Order button has been added to the Order form to enable you to quickly create a new order from an existing one.  The supplier, price and copy information will be copied into the Create Order form unless the original order is cancelled, in which case the supplier will not be copied.

 

Order State Filter

The four buttons for filtering orders by order state (All, Active, Proposed and Part Complete) have been replaced by a list that includes several new options, including Cancelled to list cancelled orders. Three options linked to supplier reports are outlined below.

 

Supplier reports

The order status reports sent by suppliers now appear in Soprano. The Reports tab on an order record displays a list of the reports with the latest at the top.

The latest report also displays on the Orders list and is indicated in the state of the order on both the form and the list.

You can quickly bring up a list of orders reported as cancelled or not accepted by the supplier by selecting either the View orders cancelled by supplier task on the Home page or Cancelled by  Supplier from the Filter by Order State list. The orders can then be cancelled individually or using the Cancel All button.

Filtering by the order state Requires Reviewing displays a list of orders with specific reports attached. These are reports that may require you to take action, such as Order line accepted, substitute product will be supplied or Order line held: note price change.

The filters Cancelled by Supplier and Requires Reviewing check for EDI reports only on the assumption that you will take any action required (e.g. cancellation) at the point of adding a manual report. Another filter, With Reports, shows orders with reports added manually as well as via EDI. The filters take into account the last thousand reports added. Reports added manually show on the Reports tab of the order and in the State column.

 

Order notes

Order notes are displayed on a new Notes tab on the order form.

 

Navigating from orders to invoices

There is now a button to enable you to move directly from an order or open order to the invoice(s) it is linked to. The button shows the number of invoices concerned.

 

Receipting improvements

A message now displays when an item is successfully receipted on the Order form. This advises you what to do with the item if necessary. In this example the item has automatically been put in transit to its home site because Auto Transit is enabled:

If you receipt an item in error you can now undo the receipt provided the item is at Received status. An Undo Receipt button displays against the item on the Order and on the Item screen.

 

Cancelling items on a part received order

A Cancel button now appears against the outstanding items on a Part complete order.

 

Shelfmark in Orders

The Shelfmark column in the Items list on an order is now populated.

 

New messages when invoice payment or order confirmation fails

A more meaningful message now displays if paying an invoice or confirming a proposed order fails.

 

Last edit information

When and by whom an order or open order was last edited now displays in the record header.

 

Improvements to the Create Open Order form

The following fields have been added to the Create Open Order form:

• Currency
• Delivery site
• Notes
• Order type
• Subscription start
• Subscription end

When you select a fund the amount available to spend is displayed.

The button for accessing this form has moved from the Open Orders tab on a serial work to the work header.

 

Deleting an invoice

A Delete button now displays on the list of invoices and the Invoice form for an EDI invoice at Potential status. This changes the status of the invoice to Deleted to enable it to be removed from the database by the edi_inv_delete.pl script.

 

Funds improvements

Soprano now distinguishes between the Closed and Not Active fund statuses and it is possible to filter funds by status.

The Create Fund button is also new. This gives you a form for creating a base fund.

The commitment and expenditure warnings can now be amended. Select the pencil control to bring up the edit form.

The Members tab on an aggregate fund has been enhanced to show the full hierarchy of funds rather than just listing the top-level members.

Change the work on an order

Sometimes you need to change the work being ordered; for example when the supplier reports that a new edition is available.

Next to the work title in the header of an order a pencil control now allows you to open a form where you can select an alternative work. The form comprises a search box and a list of results with the option to select a result as the new work; there is also an option to create a new work. By default the results of a search by the title of the original work on the order are shown.

 

Claim missing issues for Open Orders

Under the Holdings tab for a serial work there are two new columns: Expected Date and Claims. The Claim button in the Claims column creates a Potential claim. An alert to view all claims (Potential, Active and Sent) for issues in subscriptions for the current site is given at the top of the Holdings list, with a link to view them.

You can click the Claim button on a Potential claim to make it Active so that it will be sent to the supplier.

On the Home page under Purchasing a new option Review potential claims displays for enabled operators. It gives you a list of all potential claims concerning Open Order Subscriptions for the current site. A potential claim may be generated automatically with reference to the prediction pattern where the issue is late or has been skipped (the next issue has been received), or it may be generated ‘manually’ as described above. You can ‘Accept’ a claim to make it active so that it will be sent to the supplier, or you can reject it. The serial work description is linked to the work page allowing you to review the holdings to help make a decision.

 

Purchasing fixes

Cancelled order items. Items now display on a cancelled order instead of the message ‘There are no items on this order yet’.

Invoice Pay button. The Pay button now displays on an invoice that just has a charge on it provided the charge amount matches the amount payable.

View proposed orders. The task View new quotes has been renamed View proposed orders.

Acquisitions breadcrumb trail. When you’re at a detailed level in acquisitions, the breadcrumb now includes the area you’re in (such as Orders, or Funds) as a separate part of the breadcrumb trail, and you can click to go back to that level.

 

Circulation

Borrower Loans display more information

More information is displayed in the list of a borrower’s current loans (under the Borrower > On Loan tab). The item barcode is now in with the Item Description, and there are two new columns: Loan Type and Renewals. The Renewals column shows the count of renewals and the quota; this can be toggled between unseen and seen renewals by checking or unchecking the Renew As Seen box at the top of the list. When the item is reserved this is alerted with a count of the reservations in a label under the Due Date. The column heading of the check box column at the end of the rows is now All / None and you can click each of those words to check or uncheck all of the boxes.

 

Item sets

It is now possible to link together items into a set which can be issued and returned together. This feature requires Local Data Services (LDS) version 2.8.

Creating an item set

Create a Work and an associated Item to represent the set. On the Item Detail page a new button is provided: Convert To Set.

When you press the button Soprano confirms that the item has been converted to a set and it prompts you to add items to the set by entering their barcode numbers under a new tab, Contents. A blue label Item set in the header indicates that this item represents a set, whenever you view this item.

Note: Once an item has been converted to be a set parent it cannot be changed back again.

Items added to the set display in a list below the input field.

You can select a child item in the list to view its item detail page. Membership of the set is indicated in the item detail page header by a blue label In item set, together with the set name (the title of the work for the set), which is a link to the set parent item. A button allows you to remove the item from the set.

 

Issue and return an item set

Currently to issue an item set you issue each item in the set. A notice is given with a Confirm button: Item is part of a set – issuing this item will issue the parent too.

Similarly, to return an item set you return each item in the set. A notice is given with a Confirm button: Item is part of a set – returning this item will return the parent too.

Further development is planned to streamline the item set issue and return workflows.

 

Circulation fixes

Return ILL item from loan. You can now return an ILL item from loan to a borrower. A notice displays in the transaction outcome row that the item is an inter-library loan, alerting you to return it to its home site from where it can be returned to the supplier, rather than shelving it.

 

Reserve: entering the borrower number. On the reserve page with the item already present (typically having come from pressing the Reserve button on the Work), the focus is now in the Borrower Barcode input box so all you need to do is scan the borrower’s card. When you enter the borrower number the reservation is no longer immediately placed. This allows the warning of a charge to be displayed and for you to select the Collection Site before pressing the Reserve button to submit the reservation.

Dummy loans no longer displayed in Item History. When an item that is not on loan is ‘returned’ at a self-service point or in Alto, this transaction has been shown as a loan in Soprano Item History with the borrower shown as ‘DEFAULT’. Such transactions no longer display as loans.

Item barcode issues. You can now create a new item without a barcode, for example for an ebook or a non-loanable item. When you add a barcode to an item, Soprano now disallows it if the barcode already exists.

 

Classification disappearing from item shelfmark – fixed. Editing the item header information no longer results in the classification in the shelfmark disappearing.

Edit a borrower’s email address. We’ve fixed the bug where this deleted the email address.

Create borrower when change borrower photo not allowed. Global permission to change borrower photos is configurable in the Admin Console for each Soprano tenancy. When not allowed, some fields in the Create Borrower form could not be edited – this is now fixed.

Limited Access Sites and Reservations. To support libraries that loan between limited access sites and other sites, Process Reservations now allows you to transit reserved items between a limited access site and another site, or between two limited access sites.

Column heading labels in issue, renew, return. In the outcome rows in Issue, Renew and Return, the column headings ‘Fee’ and ‘Messages’ have been changed to ‘Charges’ and ‘Notices’ to use established terminology and to avoid ambiguity.

Offline transaction update problem fixed. Transactions recorded offline were failing to update when connectivity was restored if the user had moved to a different page, typically by signing in again when connectivity was available, with Soprano sending the transactions when on the Home page. Such updates now succeed.

Performance. Borrower search now requires at least one alpha numeric character, to avoid a slow response response when only non-alpha-numeric characters were entered.

Item Query alert icon. A specific icon indicating that the item has a query is now displayed in the item description area of the item header. This is in addition to the existing alert and information about the query given between the item description area and the action buttons.

 

Item Home Site label. The label for the site of an item as displayed in the Item header has been changed from ‘Current Site’ to ‘Home Site’, reflecting common terminology.

Borrower near expiry alert in Issue. An icon alerting that the borrower is near their expiry date is now displayed in the borrower card in the Issue Items page.

 

Cataloguing

Upload MARC record fix. This fixes the bug where Soprano went offline when uploading a MARC record replacement.

 

Operator Profile

View your permissions

In the black ID bar at the top of Soprano you can already click on your name and the cog icon to open your operator profile page where, if enabled, you can change your password. That profile page now includes the complete list of Soprano permissions indicating which of them are active for your operator profile at the current site. These permissions are expressed in Soprano terms; most of them are configured via the LMS SetConfig application.

 

Tills

Tills fixes

Refunds as negative amounts. Refunds in Tills are now shown in X Reports and Z Reports correctly as negative amounts, and with the correct total.

 

Connected till remembered by browser. We’ve fixed the bug so that your connected till is remembered in Firefox and IE (as well as in other browsers) when you close the browser then open it and sign in.

 

Local Data Services (LDS) requirements

Some of the new Purchasing features, and the Item sets feature in Circulation require LDS version 2.8. To request an upgrade to your LDS, please open a Support case.

 

To preview this release

You can preview this release by inserting ‘-demo’ into your tenancy URL after the word ‘soprano’: https://soprano-demo.librarymanagementcloud.co.uk/{your tenancy name}. Please remember that it accesses your live data.

 

Release to the live service

This version of Soprano will be released to the live service on Tuesday 27th June 2017.

 

Comments and contact

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch. You can comment here on the blog, in the Soprano Forum, or contact your Account Manager. To suggest and discuss additional features there is the Soprano Ideas Forum.

 

 

 

If you were unable to attend the Soprano Development Update webinar on Thursday 11th May or would like to review what we covered then you can catch up on the latest developments by watching the video of the webinar, below, or by downloading it.

The webinar covers numerous developments coming soon, chiefly in Acquisitions but some also in other areas, including:

• View Orders for a Work
• View Notes and Reports on an Order
• View and manage Orders cancelled by supplier
• More detail in Create order
• More information when paying an Invoice fails
• Control over verifying and paying by the same person
• Additional fields on Open Orders
• Messages shown when receipting issues
• Filter Funds by status
• Create Fund
• Manage Claims for journal issues
• Borrower current loans additional information
• Alert when return item is an ILL
• Till refund bug fix
• Create Item without a barcode
• View operator enablements
• Local Data Services
• and more

 

We’re pleased to announce that the version of Soprano that has been in preview recently has now been released to the live service.

Details of the inclusions are given in the release notice on the Soprano blog.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions please get in touch. You can comment here on the Soprano blog, on the Soprano forum and Soprano Ideas or contact your Account Manager or the Soprano team directly.