ByWater Solutions Announces Aspen Discovery 22.04.00 Release

by Mark Noble on Apr 13, 2022

"With Aspen’s 22.04 release, we’re excited to offer libraries a brand new option for events: LibCal integration! Libraries that use Springshare’s LibCal can now discover all of their events directly in Aspen. We’ve also added two additional eCommerce integrations: FIS WorldPay and XPress Pay. Of course we haven’t left out the LiDA library app. LiDA users can now create, edit, and view lists directly in LiDA. These are just the highlights - there’s something for everyone in this month’s release!" - Jordan Fields, Aspen Product Librarian

It's a new month and a new Aspen release! We're excited to bring our Aspen libraries dozens of enhancements and some exciting new integrations.

We continued to work on integration with Evergreen and are pleased to welcome this new ILS as the seventh (and growing!) list of ILSes that Aspen can connect with. With the other ILSes that we support, we add increased functionality in every release. In this release, we added added updates to Account profiles in Koha and increased hold functionality with Polaris.

With Hoopla, we added increased options for customizing the records that show in your opac. You can choose to hide Hoopla titles if you own other copies or you can choose to hide Hoopla titles when others are available. This allows for more cost savings and allows libraries to drive checkouts of classics and popular titles to one econtent vendor over another.

In this release, we added a "bad words list" that libraries can curate for their users by adding or subtracting "bad words" that will be hidden in list descriptions and reviews.

We have done some new development work with ecommerce and have began testing integrations with FIS WorldPay and XPress Pay. With this work, Aspen now has five ecommerce options. We will most likely be looking into adding additional ecommerce integrations later this year as well. This work makes the management of fines, fees and donations easier for both patrons and staff.

We also expanded our calendar integrations in this release with the addition of SpringShare's LibCal. Aspen can now integrate with both LibCal and Library Market. With the integration we are excited to add this new functionality for LibCal users:

• Events from LibCal can now be indexed into Aspen.
• When searching for events, patrons can narrow events by a variety of facets including Age Group, Program Type, Branch, and more.
• Events can be displayed on a calendar.
• Events will show in explore more when relevant.
• If registration for a program is required, the patron receives a link to register on LibCal.

Finally, in each release we add new functionality to Aspen Discovery's companion app, Aspen LiDA. In this release, we're most excited to bring users list functionality. Now users can see their lists, add items to a list, edit and delete lists.

We hope libraries enjoy the new developments and improvements in this release. See you next month for 22.05!

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