Surpass is a hit at Charlotte, North Carolina, Church

Surpass is full-featured library software with a price tag churches can afford.

“Surpass is an excellent value for all the capabilities it has,” declared Marie Pearce, facilitator of the Library Ministry Team at Myers Park United Methodist Church. 

“One of our library volunteers is a professional librarian,” she added.  “She was very impressed with what Surpass could do!”

Surpass’ ease of use makes its products the ideal choice for volunteer-run church libraries.  The Surpass Safari and Web Safari catalogs make it easy for church members to find materials the library owns. 

Surpass Central administration and circulation has a clear, tabbed interface that keeps menu options visible at all times.  Simply clicking the help button from any screen will provide immediate assistance for the area you are using.

Surpass Copycat helps ease data entry when entering books by smoothly locating MARC records available free in the Internet.  Rather than pay for an expensive retrospective conversion, Myers Park decided to enter materials into the system manually.  Volunteers found Surpass Copycat to be the perfect tool to help avoid entering all the data manually.  They were able to simply enter a list of ISBN's and let Copycat find a matching record for the book on the Internet and copy it into Surpass. 

“Volunteers were able to use Surpass Copycat to catalog our library with minimum training,” Marie praised.  “Those with no library experience were able to use Copycat easily and independently.”

Marie explained how user-friendly they have found the Surpass programs to be. She was also pleased to report that they've already seen an increase in their circulation even though they have not been using the program for very long.  In fact, their circulation is increasing every week!

Marie attributes much of the increase in library usage to the ability of members to search the library's collection on the Internet.  By simply accessing the church’s Web site, church members can link to Surpass Web Safari and browse the library’s collection even when the library is closed. 

Many churches libraries have a limited budget, so it’s important to know where to best allocate those limited funds.   Marie has found that Surpass reports alerted her to areas of the collection in need of more resources.  It’s also been helpful to track which resources are circulating the most.  Surpass circulation analysis and collection analysis reports are invaluable…and quick and easy to generate.

Marie highly recommends Surpass to other churches.  Surpass makes your library more friendly for volunteers and patrons alike.  It is professional software that provides the functionality and stability needed to run a library of any size smoothly and efficiently.

“Surpass is great,” Marie concludes.  “It’s easy to use, it’s affordable, and it does everything we need it to do.”    

Use Surpass Web Safari to visit the Myers Park library at:  http://www.mpumc.org/mpumc/resources