ByWater Solutions Announces Aspen Discovery 22.01.00 Release

by Mark Noble on Jan 12, 2022

The first release of 2022 brings a ton of new features and improvements including 2 factor authentication, forgotten pin functionality, improvements to search functionality and much more. We're excited to continue our work with the Aspen Community driving Aspen forward!"

We're excited to announce the first release of 2022 of Aspen Discovery- 22.01.00!

In this release, we were busy! In late 2021, we surveyed our Aspen library partners and asked them about their top priorities and focus areas for 2022 developments. We also did a deeper analysis of support tickets to identify areas of repeat questions and enhancement requests. In this release, we were able to resolve almost 80 of our partner tickets involving bugs, developments, and other enhancement suggestions.

One of our exciting new features in this release is the ability to enable two factor authentication. This allows an increased level of security for staff and patrons. In their Administration settings, Aspen libraries will not see Two Factor Authentication settings under Primary Configuration. Libraries can enable this for specific patron categories (like staff) and library locations. Libraries can also set a custom message about the functionality and generate a one time use code to allow access in case there are issues logging in.

Similarly, with account management, we added a reset password option in Aspen Discovery for those that use an ILS that doesn't have that function built-in. If your ILS has this function built in, you already have the ability to turn this on and off in Aspen Discovery.

We increased the customization of Web Builder and Web Resources pages by adding the ability to limit access unless users were either logged in or using an in-library computer. New messaging will prompt the user to login with a sign in box if they are attempting to access a resource that requires a library card. Logged in users will see the content and be able to access any restricted pages and resources seamlessly. These new functions work like an EZProzy authentication for libraries.

Additionally, we made updates to searching to further increase relevancy and ease of use for all Aspen users. A couple of the areas we focused on were improving searching for terms that include diacritics and deploying fixes for searching for emojis and other non-ascii characters.

Finally, we continued working with accessibility by allowing libraries to choose to have a minimum contrast to 7.0 for themes in Layout Settings, in line with WCAG 2.1 AAA compliance.

Overall, we hope that libraries and their users will love the features added in 22.01 and the direction we're heading in 2022 to continue to improve and expand the offerings of Aspen Discovery.

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