by Mark Noble on Mar 25, 2021
One key feature of Aspen Discovery is its ability to group different formats of a title together so patrons can see all the different versions they have access to.
As we can see from the example above, the library owns the title as a Book and Audiobook on CD. For electronic content, they own the eBook and eAudiobook in both Hoopla and OverDrive.
Patrons find this interface very easy to use since they can easily tell at a glance which formats the library provides so they can decide what format they want to use. For example, if the OverDrive copies are all checked out, they could use the Hoopla copy or if the book is checked out they could use a less popular format that is more readily available.
If a title has multiple editions, the editions are grouped together with the most available editions shown first.
In the example above, the library has purchased two different editions of the Audiobook for The Lost. Most patrons don’t care if they are listening to the 2020 edition or the 2014 edition so we direct them to the 2014 edition by default since they can get that more quickly. We still allow them to place a hold on the 2020 edition if they prefer. This is especially useful for titles like Pride and Prejudice where there may be dozens of bib records for a particular title, especially in large consortia.
The grouping and display is intuitive from a patron perspective and very easy for them to use. From a staff perspective, it’s important to note that we don’t force you to change your cataloging practices or do a lot of manual work within Aspen to group things together. When Aspen groups records together, it is looking at 3 things to determine the grouping: Title, Author, Format.
To improve grouping, Aspen normalizes titles and authors to be sure that extraneous information is not included in the grouping title and author. For example, we will remove the words “a novel” and “a memory” from the end of the title since that information tends to be cataloged inconsistently. Aspen will also remove terms like “editor”, “musical group”, “home entertainment”, etc from the author name. This method has proven to be very effective at grouping together the same title without grouping together records that may be similar, but aren’t the same.
In the event that titles do not group together, we have an easy way for staff to manually group titles together. To group titles, the staff member will need permissions to Group and Ungroup works.
Once these permissions are active, a new “Group With” button will show in search results.
Clicking this button will give you a dialog that allows you to select the title to group with.
Simply select the title you want to group with and then select 'Group'. Aspen will automatically reindex the title within a few minutes and will display the updated information to you. When titles have been grouped, you will see the alternate title and author information that was created during the grouping process within the staff view for the title.
These alternate titles and authors can be deleted to make the records ungroup again if you grouped titles incorrectly or want to change the primary work for titles.
If you have an author that has written several different books that aren’t grouping properly you can also use author authorities to change how the author name is handled. This happens semi-frequently when eContent vendors like OverDrive include a middle initial in the author’s name, but standard cataloging practice omits the middle initial.
To correct this situation, go to the Author Authorities administration page within the Catalog / Grouped Works section of the Administration page. Search for the author you want to work with and if the author doesn’t exist, add a new Author Authority. Here is an example authority for Tui Sutherland.
When you create an author authority, you don’t need to enter the Normalized Values. Aspen will generate those values as soon as indexing runs again.
If you find two titles that are grouped in a way that you don’t want them to be grouped together, you can manually ungroup them. Common cases of this are when movie studios re-release a title with new actors and directors, but the same name. For example, A Star is Born was originally released in 1937, remade in 1976, and then remade a third time in 2018. Aspen’s default grouping rules will group all 3 of these titles together unless you use a Uniform Title to separate them out.
If your catalog does not have Uniform Titles for these records, you can also ungroup them within Aspen. Simply go to the title you wish to ungroup, go to the Staff View, and select the Ungroup button.
A list of all records that have been ungrouped are shown when you view the Records To Not Group page within the Catalog / Grouped Works section of the Administration page.
From this page, you can easily edit or remove records so they will regroup automatically.
The last trick we can use to influence the record grouping is the Set Display Info function that is available within the Staff View of a Grouped Work. To use this function, you will need to have Set Grouped Work Display Information Permission. Then simply click Set Display Info and you can change the TItle, Author, Series Name, and Series Display Order for a title.
This gives you the ability to change display information to alter the displayed title or series for a record when you can’t easily change the information. For example, if you don’t like the way OverDrive or Hoopla catalogs the title you can easily override it.
Record grouping is a very powerful feature within Aspen Discovery that makes it easier for patrons to understand and interact with your collection and gives more control over cataloging to library staff. Although it works very well out of the box, we love giving staff the power to do some simple things that can improve grouping and user experience for your patrons.
Did You Know?
Did you know we work with catalogers at our partner libraries to continually improve the record grouping logic?
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