The Aspen 24.04 release brings improvements to econtent integrations for Discovery and better permissions management for the LiDA library app.

by Jordan Fields on Apr 17, 2024

Although Aspen has had the ability to support children's catalogs for close to a decade, scoping econtent by age group for audience-specific interfaces wasn’t available for every econtent provider. Now that econtent vendors are reliably providing data on age appropriateness, we’ve added controls so that all econtent can be included in children’s catalogs."

- Jordan Fields, Aspen Product Librarian

At AspenCon last month we asked our community what new development they would most like to see for Aspen Discovery during our Tournament of Features, and the winner was improvements to econtent integrations. This month we’re delivering the first of those improvements with the ability to scope all API-integrated econtent by audience.

Scoping a catalog by audience is different from filtering by audience. While a filter or facet is what a patron uses to narrow down a collection to, say, all of the children’s materials, a scoped catalog excludes all materials that are not within a specific scope. Therefore a scoped children’s catalog would only include children’s materials without the ability to expand to include adult materials too. These scoped catalogs are becoming increasingly popular as is econtent for kids, making it essential that Aspen administrators have the ability to scope econtent by age. Several examples of scoped kids catalogs on Aspen Discovery include the Bennington Free Library, Los Gatos Library, and the McKinney Public Library System.

Also in support of improving econtent integrations, Aspen released additional enhancements to the Palace Project to give libraries a lot more control over which collections to bring into Aspen, how those collections should be named, and which collections should be available to each member of a consortium.

Aspen LiDA users are getting a significant improvement to understanding how LiDA interacts with their device permissions. The app now has a dedicated permissions section under user preferences that clearly displays the device permissions the patron has granted or not granted to LiDA. It also explains in simple language what LiDA uses those permissions for and provides a link to the device’s phone settings to give the user an easy way to update their permissions. These updated settings will provide patrons with peace of mind that when they decide to allow LiDA to have access to specific device functions, they know exactly what they are allowing the app to do.

As always, these are just a few of the more than 50 enhancements in this release. Check out the 24.04 complete release notes to read about them all!

This release includes code contributions from:

• ByWater Solutions

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