The new Soutron Serials and Acquisitions modules are undergoing the last stages of testing, but they are not the only features that we have been working on. Our R&D team has shared with us a sneak peek at some of the new features coming soon.
Date Groups
Dates are important when searching archives and can improve search accuracy. A new feature is the facility to set date descriptions for blocks of time. This will make it easier for users to express date ranges such as “Middle Ages” or “The Sixties”. The indexing and date searches can then be applied across a date range.
New Search Results Layouts
Search might be considered the most important part of the system. It is the “shop window” for all of your content that you have carefully selected, acquired, and stored. Knowing this, we continue to work on improving facilities available to improve Search for end Users.
We are making it possible for you to display information using locally customized layouts, improving the end user experience. Each content type can have different layouts – perhaps a citation view for some materials and a “block image” view for others.
This Search Portal enhancement provides greater control over service options. Soutron now offers more choice to librarians beyond conventional displays in OPAC-based systems. This new capability will be available following the release of version 4.1.
Inventory Management Update
The introduction of the Global Copy Edit function in 2017 has proved to be a very popular addition to the system for inventory management. We are extending this functionality to simplify inventory management and make stock checking less onerous. Work has begun and our expectation is that this new functionality will be available as a part of the version 4.1 release.
Version Identification
To help you identify which version of Soutron you are running you will be able to see this information within the application footer, beginning with version 4.1.
For more details on our latest software updates, visit our sister company Soutron UK.