[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Evergreen 2.12 beta is released

[Kathy Lussier]

The Evergreen community is pleased to announce the beta release of
Evergreen 2.12 and the beta release of OpenSRF 2.5. The releases are
available for download and testing from the Evergreen downloads page at
https://evergreen-ils.org/egdownloads/ and from the OpenSRF downloads page
at https://evergreen-ils.org/opensrf-downloads/. Testers must upgrade to
OpenSRF 2.5 to test Evergreen 2.12.

This release includes the implementation of acquisitions and booking in
the new web staff client in addition to many web client bug fixes for
circulation, cataloging, administration and reports. We strongly encourage
libraries to start using the web client on a trial basis in production.
All functionality is available for testing with the exception of serials
and offline circulation.

Other notable new features and enhancements for 2.12 include:

* Overdrive and OneClickdigital integration. When configured, patrons will
be able to see ebook availability in search results and on the record
summary page. They will also see ebook checkouts and holds in My Account.

* Improvements to metarecords that include:
  - improvements to the bibliographic fingerprint to prevent the system
from grouping different parts of a work together and to better
distinguish between the title and author in the fingerprint;
  - the ability to limit the “Group Formats & Editions” search by format
or other limiters;
  - improvements to the retrieval of e-resources in a “Group Formats &
Editions” search;
  - and the ability to jump to other formats and editions of a work
directly from the record summary page.

* The removal of advanced search limiters from the basic search box, with
a new widget added to the sidebar where users can see and remove those
limiters.
* A change to topic, geographic and temporal subject browse indexes that
will display the entire heading as a unit rather than displaying
individual subject terms separately.
* Support for right-to-left languages, such as Arabic, in the public
catalog. Arabic has also become a new officially-supported language in
Evergreen.
* A new hold targeting service supporting new targeting options and
runtime optimizations to speed up targeting.
* In the web staff client, the ability to apply merge profiles in the
record bucket merge and Z39.50 interfaces.
* The ability to display copy alerts when recording in-house use.
* The ability to ignore punctuation, such as hyphens and apostrophes, when
performing patron searches.
* Support for recognition of client time zones,  particularly useful for
consortia spanning time zones.

With release 2.12, minimum requirements for Evergreen have increased to
PostgreSQL 9.3 and OpenSRF 2.5

For more information about what will be available in the release, check
out the draft release notes at
https://evergreen-ils.org/documentation/previews/RELEASE_NOTES_2_12_beta.html.

Many thanks to all of the developers, testers, documentors, translators,
funders and other contributors who helped make this release happen.