Aspen Discovery Announces 20.04 Release and Notes

by Jessie Zairo on Mar 30, 2020

Aspen Discovery announced this week that the 20.04 release is available. This major release includes 22 improvements and 1 bug fix.

Mark Noble, Aspen Discovery Developer, recently commented on the release:

We are extremely excited about the new functionality in this release, it's hard to choose a favorite new feature. Placards are much improved, especially for consortia. RBdigital integration got some love to help consortia and readers looking for back issues. But, I think my favorite new feature is the OMDB integration to help show cover images for movies which helps libraries save money on cover art.

Release Notes

Administration updates

• Display release notes within the user interface
• Allow filtering of logs to only show errors
• Allow users without opacAdmin privileges to see Collection Spotlights available for Any Library
• Allow users with userAdmin privileges to masquerade as any user when masquerade is turned on.
• Increase the maximum allowed size of the system message

Book cover updates

• Give content editors the permission to upload covers
• Updates for reloading covers from an individual record
• Only process google books api for grouped works, not individual records
• Add the ability to use OMDB as a source of movie covers

CloudLibrary updates

• Increase timeouts when contacting CloudLibrary to avoid error messages with slow responses

Koha Integration Updates

• Correct account behavior for patrons that have a username, but no barcode assigned
• Added the ability to restrict which locations are valid for self-registration

Placard Updates

• Updated to allow a link to be defined for the Placard to direct the user to a specific location when clicking the Placard or image on the placard.
• Allow users to dismiss individual placards if an administrator decides it is dismissable.
• Allow placards to be displayed for individual libraries and locations

RBdigital Updates

• Update RBdigital to allow for multiple settings to be defined per installation for consortial usage
• Update RBdigital to index and display all issues for a magazine.
• Update cover display of RBdigital magazines to show cover for each issue.
• Allow account interactions with magazines to be done at the issue-level including checkouts, returns, etc.
• Users are not automatically logged into RBdigital from the Checked Out Titles page when selecting the Open In RBdigital button.

User List Updates

• Updates for automatic generation of List Covers when not all entries in the list are valid works.
• Updates for the inclusion of New York Times list when search results are limited to list publishers to include

Bugs and Minor Updates

• Allow bib level holds by default for items that do not have a value specified in format translation maps