ByWater Solutions Announces Aspen Discovery 21.13.00 Release

by Mark Noble on Oct 13, 2021

In this release we focused on addressing our partner's most common requests. In total, we addressed over 60 requests and enhancements to make Aspen even easier to use for both library patrons and staff."

-Mark Noble, Aspen Discovery Lead Developer

We're excited to announce the release of Aspen Discovery 21.13!

As of last week, the Aspen Discovery companion app, Aspen LiDA, is now officially available in both the Apple App Store and Google Play store for you to download! This app is just out of beta testing so there is still a lot of functionality that we are working on building in. But, we have made searching easier and more visually engaging, especially when displaying the different formats available. Users can easily sort through beautiful browse categories to discover new materials. Users can access their library account, library card, and place holds on items. Libraries will love that their catalog and app have a seamless look and feel. We will have an official launch party for the app on November 4th- so stay tuned for that!

** If you want to seem a live demo of the app, we are also hosting a free Aspen LiDA Webinar tomorrow October 14 at 2pm. Register here. **

A little less glamorous, but still important feature of the 21.13 release, is we cleaned up Overdrive and general indexing for performance. We have made it easier for patrons to find materials available at their library and make it more clear to them which location an item is available at when accessing a library system that has multiple branches/locations. All Aspen libraries should notice faster performance and nightly indexing as well!

We love to see the creative placards that libraries create to promote their collections, databases, programs, and resources. We are increasingly working to make Aspen more accessible for all library users. In this release, the ability to add alt-text to placards was added, so that placards can be used with screen readers.

Finally, we have seen over the last couple years the demand for online self registration increasing across libraries. Library staff and users want the self registration to be simple and painless for new library users. In this release, we have made the self registration form and fields more customizable by given the library the ability to use css to tailor these fields to meet their community's needs.

We hope you enjoy the new enhancements in Aspen Discovery 21.13!

We'll see you November 4th to go over the release of 21.14.

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