The Aspen Discovery and LiDA 24.01 release starts the year off with a bang that includes ecommerce, support for external links, and a new locations design for LiDA!

by Jordan Fields on Jan 17, 2024

We’ve had lots of new libraries going live on the LiDA app over the past few months and we’ve loved hearing all of the thoughts and suggestions from our partners and their patrons for new LiDA features. We are thrilled to be able to make several of those improvements this month!"

- Jordan Fields, Aspen Product Librarian

One thing we’ve heard from many of our libraries using LiDA is that patrons want to do everything in the app that they can do in Aspen Discovery. In support of that goal, we’re launching several new LiDA features this month. The first is eCommerce support. Now, patrons can go directly to the fines page in Discovery from the My Account drawer in LiDA to pay their fines without ever leaving the app!

We’ve also added the ability for LiDA to link to any external website from the “More” screen. This will allow libraries to further customize the user experience and provide more information to their patrons through the app. These links are per library system, so different libraries in a consortium can each have their own set of links. Links are managed directly from Aspen Discovery so administrators can manage links for both Discovery and LiDA easily from one place!

We’ve also upgraded the location screen to include support for an image and more user-friendly links for navigating to and contacting the library.

For LiDA, we also made improvements to how users are prompted to turn on notifications, as well as how users who opt out of geolocation are able to find their individual library and log in.

Of course not all of this month’s updates were for LiDA! Discovery saw more than 50 updates as well including support for Stripe as an ecommerce vendor, support for Quipu’s eRenew, and improvements to web forms that will allow admins to export form responses to CSV so that each form response field is exported separately.

You can learn more about all of the 24.01 improvements for Aspen Discovery and LiDA in this month’s release notes.

This release includes code contributions from:

• ByWater Solutions

• Theke Solutions

• Equinox Open Library Initiative

Thanks to all of our contributors and our community for another successful release!

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