ByWater Solutions Announces Aspen Discovery 21.15.00 Release

by Mark Noble on Dec 8, 2021

The customizations that we've added to the Aspen Discovery homepage in this release are designed to help patrons personalize their experience to better engage with the library and the library catalog."

We're excited to announce the release of Aspen Discovery 21.15!

This is the fifteenth major release of 2021! What an incredible year it has been. We wanted to make sure the last full release of the year was full of goodies for our library partners and their patrons.

Our work with Aspen browse categories and giving patrons the ability to more closely control and personalize their catalog experience is one of new enhancements available in 21.15. Patrons will now be able to have their saved searches and lists prominently displayed alongside of their recommendations right when they log in to the catalog. Moreover, they can easily hide browse categories that are not relevant to them. This empowers patrons to have more control over their catalog experience and how they interact with library materials. We also hope this will more effectively guide patrons to more of the materials they want to engage with.

The work with personalizing browse categories also translates seamlessly with the Aspen LiDA app. The app update includes these enhancements to browse categories as well as more easier to use patron account features.

You can learn more about the enhancements to Personalizing Browse Categories here.

In this release, we also made improvements to the Overdrive/Libby fulfillment interface. Previewing, checking out, and accessing e-resources is now more seamless for patrons right within Aspen. Patrons will now be able to stream, listen, and read with less clicks and less confusion.

In the spirit of the holidays and giving, we released a donation functionality via e-commerce in 21.15. Libraries can now link to and gather donations via any eCommerce provider supported by Aspen. This is available to both logged in and logged out patrons, making gathering supporting funds for the library even easier. To further the personalization, patrons may choose to honor someone or leave a donation in someone's memory and libraries can choose to give patrons the ability to specify where they would like to designate their funds.

For those Aspen users with the Symphony ILS, course reserves can now be automatically loaded. There is a new module for course reserves that will allow settings to be modified for the import and indexing. This is a new functionality in Aspen and we look forward to expanding this to more ILS users in future releases.

Finally, we are continuing our work with translations and making Aspen Discovery fully accessible for users all over the globe. In this release, Arabic and Hebrew languages are now displayed right to left.

These and many more enhancements are available now in 21.15! We thank everyone for another fantastic year developing the world's most dynamic and customizable library discovery layer. Don't worry, we'll see see you in a few weeks for the first release of 2022! Thanks to everyone in the Aspen community and have a happy holiday season.

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 eContent and other third-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. It also improves relevancy and ease of use, provides native reading recommendations, displays all formats of titles within one result (record grouping), and much more. With included features like web builder and mobile app (Aspen LiDA), Aspen was created to give users an improved experience over other Discovery systems, with less impact on library budgets.

For More Information

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