You Wish, We Listen!

Surpass 6.20 contains many new features and enhancements taken directly from the Wish List, including two of the most often-requested features: the ability to attach your own cover art to materials and options to alert you when a patron's family member has overdues or fines.

Custom Cover Art

While the comprehensive Safari Selections database includes book jacket images for virtually all widely available books, you may have some items in your collection that don't have a matching cover art image from Safari Selections. These could be non-book items such as DVDs, older items, regionally published books, obscure titles, and so forth.

Using the Cover Art feature, you can add your own cover art image for any item in your Surpass database. These will be displayed to you and your patrons in Surpass Central, Self-Check, and Safari. It's as easy as drag & drop or copy & paste.

You are not limited to using this feature for just cover art. You could also use it to attach any images such as a photos of cataloged equipment, artifacts, artwork, etc.

Family Relationships

The new Family tab in Patrons allows you to view and edit family relationships for the selected patrons. Besides helping you and your staff members to better know your patrons, these relationships can be used to set up circulation alerts to notify you at the circulation desk when certain family members have overdue items or unpaid fines.

Other Enhancements

Some of the other Wish List-inspired enhancements include:

• New e-reader and tablet (iPad) category icons
• Easier-to-read Codabar barcodes
• E-book and other links in Safari search result lists
• Lock MARC records to prevent editing by other locations
• LC Call Number Divisions report by subclass
• Unused Barcode report by Codabar location code
• Separate security level for publishing book reviews

Surpass 6.20 includes many other enhancements and bug fixes. Select your software from the Download Updates & Documentations section on the left to see the complete "What's New" list.

Important: Surpass 6.20 upgrades your database irreversibly  making it incompatible with older versions of Surpass applications. You must upgrade all Surpass applications at the same time. If you are using Safari Web Edition and/or Centriva Server, please ask your network gurus to update those servers before you update your Surpass applications. All of these updates are available here on SurpassSupport.com.

As always, make sure you have a good backup before installing any update.

Surpass Awards & Honors

Surpass Awards & Honors, available in Safari, is an exciting new feature that will integrate dozens of literary awards and honors into your library's catalog! Winners of a wide variety of awards, including the Newbery Medal, Caldecott Medal, and Pulitzer Prize, update transparently through your Internet connection. You'll automatically receive new honorees as they are announced.

Your own collection is seamlessly integrated with Surpass Awards & Honors, giving your patrons easy access to browse and search through award winners while also helping you to plan future acquisitions. Our database of awards includes a wide variety and is continually growing to include all of the content your library needs. Don't see your favorite award listed? Let us know, and we'll add it!

Server-Down Circulation

Surpass Server-Down Circulation is a free add-on to Surpass Central that allows basic circulation tasks to be performed without a connection to the Surpass database. It keeps a record of all transactions performed off-line, and then allows you to synchronize those transactions with your Surpass database once you are able to connect to it.

Server-Down Circulation is perfect for bookmobiles or any other situation in which your must perform circulation yet you cannot immediately connect to the Surpass database.