ByWater Solutions Announces Aspen Discovery 21.11.00 Release

by Mark Noble on Sep 3, 2021

With this release we're thrilled to help our libraries develop a community translation system that all Aspen libraries can participate in to better serve patrons where English is not their primary language." - Mark Noble

Surprise! We released 21.11 a week early to bring even more enhancements to our Aspen Discovery libraries. This release is focused primarily on these areas:

• Developed a community translation system that allows all of Aspen to be translated; and for translation to be shared centrally across all Aspen libraries
• Created a more dynamic "My Account" section that more visually presents an overview of the patron's account and even includes personalized title recommendations
• Updated the "Materials Request" form to make internal workflows and staff commenting more streamlined when processing these requests

The work we did on languages and translation the last several weeks has been a labor of love, analyzing every piece of text and code to make sure that Aspen Discovery is fully translatable. The enhancements to translations allows Aspen to better serve patrons where English is not their primary language. Furthermore, in the spirit of the open source community, we have developed a way to share translations across Aspen libraries. A central server will host all the translation work done in the community and be available to other libraries, so that libraries can access a variety of languages for their patrons. Beyond sharing translations, this infrastructure opens up future doors for our libraries to share more information like Placards and Browse Categories across the Aspen community.

In the "My Account" section of the patron account, we made the font and design more visually accessible when showing an overview of the patron's checkouts, holds, overdue items, and items ready for checkout. We also gave the ability for libraries to turn off or turn on an image of the the patron's library card and information on card expiration dates. In line with our main goal of Aspen, to maximize patron usage of all library materials, we also included a "Recommended for You" carousel within the patron account. From there, a patron can click through their own personal display of titles, learn more about an item, and even check the item out!

We added additional functions to the Materials Request form so that libraries can choose to turn on internal communication options for their staff to improve workflows. This enables libraries to make staff comments such as deciding to move forward with the request or reason for denying request.

Along with these major improvements, we made dozens of other enhancements to areas like searching and indexing, the Aspen app, permissions, and enhancements specific to each underlying ILS. Find out more about these in the full release notes below. In the next release, our goals are to improve Aspen's geolocation capabilities as well as to continue making updates to the Aspen app.

Read the Full Release Notes

You can find the full release notes here.

Watch a Preview of the Release

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