"We reviewed thousands of customer suggestions for this release," said Kevin Sorensen, Athena quality assurance and product manager. "In addition to implementing new suggested features like Bookings and Hourly Checkouts, we created a great reading-program search interface and selected many smaller suggestions that make Athena even easier to use. Athena customers did themselves a great service by making their wishes known. This latest version offers the user the best possible experience."

Athena 9.1 includes the following new features and innovations:

• Hourly checkouts
  
  
• Setting hourly loan periods
  
  
• Generating and e-mailing patron-status reports and circulation summaries when an item is placed on hold, booked in advance, checked out, or a fine payment is made
  
  
• Renewing items by bar-code number
  
  
• Spell-checking text entered in the Easy Entry or MARC Entry screens and while searching the online catalog
  
  
• Extracting patron or catalog data along with current or statistical circulation data. These data sets can be used in external programs like report generators for unique reporting needs.
  
  
• Enhanced reading-program searches that can limit quick, advanced, or visual searches to reading-program levels and point values
  
  
• Specifying a search-term range to better limit search results
  
  
• Printing reports to a tab-delimited text file that can be viewed and modified in most word processing and spreadsheet programs