Athenaeum Pro 7.6

Athenaeum Pro is a fully featured library management package designed for schools and other organisations. It offers great catalogue management, stock take and analysis utilities; strong circulation controls with optional overrides for administrations; as well as in-depth analysis of borrowing history for borrowers and catalogue items. It is an affordable, easy-to-use package to effectively manage the resources of your school or private library; books, CD's, audio tapes, video tapes; in fact, any library asset you want to track! This latest version of our long-established program is based on FileMaker Pro 8.5 and can be used on Macintosh OS X 10.3.9, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

For over 14 years library systems by SumWare Consulting have been successfully used by organisations all around the world!

You can download the Reference manual by clicking this link or go to the Athenaeum downloads page and download all documents and a fully functional trial version.

Mac OS X "Leopard" Compatible update

The introduction of Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" introduced some crashing bugs and problems with instant web publishing.

The crashing bugs have been fixed by FileMaker Inc. (to do with System Date formats and regional settings as well as some problems with the web viewer) and users of Leopard should use the new run-time from our web site or update their FileMaker Pro software to version 9.0v3.

This version can be downloaded from the downloads page.

Note that users with Mac OS X 10.3.9 should use the "8.5" engine.

Windows Vista Compatibility

Athenaeum Pro 7.6 based on the "8.5v2" run-time or with FileMaker Pro 8.5v2 are certified compatible.

Upgrading from 7.0?

Download this .pdf or clickthis link for a brief slideshow describing the differences.

Issues/returns

Issues, returns are fast with lots of flexibility in the configuration. Athenaeum Pro offers a very high degree of control, allowing multiple borrower types (each with different borrowing privileges) and the ability to control borrowing on every resource individually. Librarians can override disallowed loans, search for borrowers during the issue process by code or name and even switch to a fast issue mode that overrides all borrower priviliges or item restrictions (this is great when a teacher comes in wanting 50 different books beyond his/her entitlement and you just want to get the boks - and teacher - out of the door).

Athenaeum also keeps track of optional fines (for overdue items),

Catalogue Detail

Athenaeum Pro will generate bar codes and spine labels for library items or borrowers, track the condition of resources and gives you an instant overview of the value of all, or a subset of your catalogue items. For every item in the catalogue, you may store purchase price, a donation (or unpaid) component if you like (the two added together make the replacement cost), and its own depreciation rate that calculates to a depreciated book value for that item. Also, you can create, at any time, a report that summarises values for any part or all of the catalogue.

The Locator can assist borrowers searching for items with a map or photo linked to the stored location

With an internet connection, stored URLs can be viewed without launching a web browser.

You can easily determine the most used items as well as the least borrowed items that might be candidates for culling.

Other reports allow you to determine the borrowing habits of your library patrons.

Your borrowers can even write their own reviews of books they have read for other children to use.

Catalogue 'tabbed view' offers a simplified view of each catalogue item's detail. Instant issue history is available with the click of a button.

The catalogue 'overview' shows all required information on a single screen (it looks complex, but takes a surprisingly short time to acclimatise). Click for a larger view.

The issue screen can show a borrower photograph, up to 10 of the borrower's current issues. The last transaction is displayed at the bottom of the screen.

FlexiSpell™

FlexiSpell can allow you to configure Athenaeum so that students with spelling difficulties can still search your catalogue effectively.

If you observe that students frequently have trouble spelling a subject key word, you might add to the FlexiSpell dictionary the common misspellings for that key word. FlexiSpell can then process the catalogue to allow some tolerance in spelling. This can allow the students to still find the Resources they need, even though their spelling is not up to scratch (however, they will never see the miss-spellings in the catalogue).

Contact SumWare Consulting to find out more about the workings of FlexiSpell.

Internet

The start of Instant Web publishing support has appeared in Athenaeum Pro 7.0. By turning on FileMaker Pro's Instant Web publishing, you can do simple searches of the catalogue using a web browser on up to 5 computers, simultaneously. To obtain more than 5 simultaneous connections, you must use FileMaker Server Advanced.

Container Objects

Every catalogue item may now store a container object. A container object is a picture (a book cover, flag, etc.), movie, sound, or document (such as Adobe Acrobat .pdf format documents) that can can be stored inside Athenaeum or as a reference to a location on a server.

Make film archives, store electronic documents of any kind such as student's work, include graphical objects with visual meaning to assist searchers in their hunt for resources.

Advantages over Athenaeum Light?

Here are some of the differences between Athenaeum Pro and Athenaeum Light. You will find more information in tabular format in our CheckList.

• includes FlexiSpell©.
• has strong flexibility with respect to loan privileges, borrower control (suspension or optional fines)
• allows declined issues can be overridden by the administrator (with the options password)
• will, during the issue process, allow borrowers to be searched for by first or last name if their bar code is not immediately available
• allows issues of "collections" of items, where any single item in the collection can be issued and optionally automatically issuing all other available items in the collection
• can more easily separate and report on library and resource items
• has more reports for analysing all or any part of your catalogue and circulation
• has an "automatic" and a manual (fast and thorough) stock take facility
• allows borrowers to write reviews for catalogue items
• has more documentation
• has a strong, ongoing development cycle, Athenaeum Light is provided on an as-is basis
• can limit the issue of individual items independently of the borrowers privileges, nor can you set individual depreciation rates for items
• includes HTML starter templates so you can, if you own FileMaker Pro 4.0v2 or higher, can share your catalogue over the internet

Catalogue Specifications

• Track and maintain tens of thousands of items (currently the largest Athenaeum catalogue in New Zealand Schools is over 54,000 items and it seems to run just nicely)
• Track special language needs met by selected items
• Flexible subject categorisation &endash; store up to hundreds of subject keywords for every item in your catalogue, in a free form manner, making it easy to find items or resources matching the searcher's criteria
• Extremely fast key word searches &endash; enter a single word in the search dialog box and Athenaeum Light automatically searches subjects, titles, authors, illustrators, series and notes in the single search
• Free-form notes field for every item allowing you to store up to thousands of words of miscellaneous information
• Boolean searches:&endash; advanced "AND", "OR" and "NOT" searches can be created to increase search precision and create complex searches
• The catalogue can contain geographically diverse items, spread across a number of locations
• Facility for tracking author origin
• Each item in the catalogue is automatically cross-referenced to other catalogue items by the same author
• every item in the catalogue can store it's own depreciation rate (e.g. Library items might depreciate at 12.5% per annum, but sports resources may be depreciated at 20%)
• Instant display by administrators of purchase details, depreciated book value and the number of times the item has been issued.
• Stock-take facility - thorough, fast and semi-automatic. This last type
• Import of USMARC information from NZ Bibliographic Network (an optional extra cost service for New Zealand)

Borrowers

• Delinquent borrower management via fines, suspension or simply reduced borrower privileges
• Provision for borrowers with extra privileges
• Borrowers can add their own reviews (with built-in spelling checking) for any item
• Independently set maximum number of items by fiction, non-fiction, senior fiction, senior non-fiction, audio-visual and "other".
• Borrowers can be students, teachers, class-rooms, other libraries or anything you like, even principals!

Circulation

• Fast issue and return of catalogue items - a single keyboard shortcut at any time.
• Quick analysis of current borrower issues, if desired
• Create and manage reserve queues (first in, first out basis)
• Find most or least active borrowers
• Overdue item tracking. Report on all overdue items; create one of two customisabe overdue letters for some or all overdue items.
• Easy loan extensions

Analysis

• Catalogue value (actual cost, depreciated book value and estimated replacement cost), size and breakdown (of all or part of the library)
• Track most-used items
• Find items for culling
• Issue recall notices
• Individual item loan history
• Analyse borrowing by 'year' or 'room'
• Manual stock take

General & Customisation

• Optional prevention of loans if fines are outstanding
• Optional Fines calculated by a flat fee, an amount per day, the cost of the overdue item or any combination of these, or just simply switched off!
• configuration for library open Saturday and Sunday
• On-line question-and-answer based help system
• Electronic documentation (optional printing on PostScript™ laser printers &endash; unlimited reprint license)
• Options to bring in catalogue data from NZ National Library, Curriculum Corp SCIS or other MARC data sources

Trial version

A trial version is available to download. It is fully functional but will only run for 60 days. Click the Downloads link at the left to go to our downloads pages.

Minimum Hardware

A PC running Windows 2000 (Service Pack 2) or XP (Service Pack 4) or Windows Vista with 512 Megabytes of RAM and sufficient hard disk space (modern computers generarlly have big enough hard disks now).

• To network Athenaeum Pro, you will need FileMaker Pro 8.5 and an appropriate network card configured for your PC and be connected to your local area network.

Macintosh running OS X 10.3.9 or 10.4.9.

We recommend a minimum of 512 Megabytes of RAM.

A USB memory stick or writeable CD-R is highly recommended for backup due to their speed, convenience, robustness and reasonably low price.

Bar Code reader recommended (although not strictly required). This should be "soft" configurable to read a variety of bar-code types.

Networking Athenaeum Pro 7.6

To network Athenaeum, you must have FileMaker Pro 8.5 on each computer that will use Athenaeum.

You may network up to 5 copies of FileMaker Pro 8.5 using "peer-to-peer" networking.

Hosting a master copy of Athenaeum with FileMaker Server 8.0v4 on a dedicated server will allow up to 250 copies of FileMaker Pro 8.5 (Windows or Mac or both) to connect simultaneously.

To access Athenaeum Pro with a web browser, either a single copy of FileMaker Pro 8.5 must be hosting Athenaeum and then up to 5 simultaneous connections to Athenaeum with a web browser can be achieved. To achieve up to 100 simultaneous web connections, Athenaeum must be hosted with FileMaker Server Advanced. Web clients are permitted to search the catalogue, though the administrator can enable borrower accounts that can log in and see their issues, overdues and reserves. The web browser must be either FireFox, Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or Safari 1.2 (due to the heavy use of CSS).