ByWater Solutions Announces Aspen Discovery 21.12.00 Release

by Mark Noble on Sep 17, 2021

With this release we're thrilled to prepare for the full launch of the Aspen Discovery LiDA app! The other work we've done in this release will continue to help patrons better utilize the wealth of materials available at their libraries." - Mark Noble

We're excited to announce the 12th release of the year- Aspen Discovery 21.12.00. We're still moving full speed ahead on making enhancements to our Aspen Discovery LiDA (Library Discovery App) app. The app is undergoing Beta testing but we're hoping to push to app stores in 2-3 weeks. In this release, we cleaned up patron functionality and enhanced geolocation services.

In this release, we continued to enhance e-content integration with Cloud Library, OverDrive and Hoopla, to make the Aspen patron experience even more seamless. The specific improvements we made to the Hoopla integration assisted with indexing and record grouping, as well as more accurately determining an appropriate audience for content like music.

The work done in this release with indexing helped to give additional control to library staff and patrons when displaying records. Staff now have the ability to suppress eContent stored within the ILS by matching 856u links. There is increased ability to determine fiction/non-fiction based on item subfield. Additionally, there is the ability to hide any uncategorized materials (i.e. non-coded) in order to make searching facets more accurate to get patrons and staff to materials faster.

We continued our work on languages and translations in this release, correcting any diacritics issues when reading MARC records from the database. We also did exciting work with menus and placards, giving the ability to staff to create multiple versions in multiple languages. Staff are now able to target programming, resources, databases, and areas of the library catalog/website to specific groups of people based on language.

Finally, we are thrilled with the enhancements to the Aspen Web Builder that happened in this release. We have seen an increased usage and interest in making Aspen Discovery a library's sole library website and we continue to develop Web Builder to be an easy to use and visually engaging interface. We integrated TinyMCE, the world's #1 open source rich text editor, into Web Builder to give staff the ability to upload images directly into the page, drag and drop images, and build pages faster.

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