Aspen Discovery 21.04.00 Release Summary

by Mark Noble on Mar 31, 2021

Our partners have been asking for the ability to view account information within search results and detailed pages to help patrons easily see what they have checked out and on hold within the catalog. Aspen Discovery 21.04 adds this functionality for physical materials and all eContent sources.

For patrons that have linked to their children’s accounts or partner’s accounts, they can also see holds and checkouts for the linked accounts. This functionality will help to make sure that patrons can easily tell what title in a series they are currently reading and avoid the frustration of trying to place holds on materials they already have checked out. An example of the display is shown below.

We also worked to improve the performance of Aspen Discovery in a few situations. The first area addressed was cases where there are a large number of records grouped together with many holdings. For example, in a large consortia, classics can have dozens of records grouped together with hundreds of items. Aspen is now 10-20 times faster in this case.

The other case we addressed was loading and displaying holds and checkouts especially when patrons had 50 or more titles checked out or on hold or when a patron had linked to several different accounts. Aspen Discovery will now cache this information for up to 15 minutes to reduce load on the underlying ILS and eContent providers and improve response times for patrons.

Finally, we have started integration with the Polaris ILS. Initial support included indexing information via the Polaris APIs and viewing account information, holds and checkouts. We expect full support for Polaris to be available in the next release of Aspen Discovery.

In addition to the major enhancement above, over a dozen additional changes and bug fixes have been made within Aspen Discovery 21.04.

Read the Full Release Notes

You can find the full release notes here.

About Aspen Discovery

Aspen is a full-featured Discovery System that integrates with e-content and other 3rd party providers, giving your patrons comprehensive access to all of your materials in one place. Aspen combines your library catalog with e-content, digital archives, and enrichment from all major third-party providers improves relevancy and ease of use, provides native reading recommendations, displays all formats of titles within one result (FRBR/record grouping) and much more. Aspen was created to give users an improved experience over other Discovery systems with less of an impact on library budgets. For more information about Aspen please visit https://bywatersolutions.com/projects/aspen-discovery.

For More Information

Jessica Zairo
Director of Library Sales and Outreach
ByWater Solutions
bywatersolutions.com
Phone:(888)900-8944