Aspen Discovery Announces 20.05 Release and Notes

by Jessie Zairo on Apr 14, 2020

Aspen Discovery announced this week that the 20.05 release is available. This major release includes a new feature, 26 improvements, and several minor bug fixes.

Mark Noble, Aspen Discovery Developer, recently commented on the release:

I'm excited to advance our goal of maximizing patron usage of all library materials in this release. The addition of event searching will help direct patrons to relevant events that they may not otherwise be aware of.

Release Notes

Administration updates

• Allow administrators using ByWater support to submit tickets to ByWater Solutions from the administrative interface
• Allow configuration of email addresses for ticket reports and automated reports using the new System Variables settings
• Make reCAPTCHA settings configurable in the admin interface
• Add automatic checking to ensure the server has at least 5GB of free disk space
• Add automatic checking for errors during index processes
• Add automatic checking for errors during cron processes
• Ensure that all errors have messages attached to them for easier diagnostics

API updates

• In getItemAvailability return that records are not holdable if holdability is disabled for the library

Cloud Library updates

• Add additional diagnostic information to Cloud Library extract

Explore More updates

• Explore more will show fewer sample records to make it easier to see that search results can be viewed. The system will still try to show at least 4 items in explore more.

Hoopla updates

• Update data extraction with additional error handling

Library Calendar Events integration updates

• Added the ability to interface with Library Calendar by Library Market.
• Events are indexed automatically using the RSS feed from Library Calendar
• Events are shown within Explore more when relevant searches are performed
• An event calendar may be shown at /Events/Calendar
• Event images are automatically generated based on the title of the event and date of the event

Koha integration updates

• Correct loading Self Registration configuration from Koha
• Additional logic during the self-registration process to handle cases when the email already exists and when a barcode is not returned

Library setting updates

• Sidebar links can optionally be shown only to logged-in users
• Self-registration can optionally redirect to an existing URL

OverDrive updates

• Fix extract process to handle changes for parsing availability
• Increase the maximum size of partCount field for formats

Reading History updates

• Update reading history background processor to process multiple entries simultaneously for better performance
• Properly handle RBdigital magazines in reading history that isn't in the index

Record updates

• Allow PDFs to be attached to MARC records for download by patrons to provide an online version.

Reporting updates

• Add tracking of self registrations completed by users and add results to the ILS Dashboard

Sitemap Updates

• Update creation of sitemaps to occur nightly via cron
• Update sitemaps to include all grouped works within each aspen instance
• Update sitemap generation to more closely conform to Google Sitemap specifications

Website Indexing

• Properly encode spaces in URLs prior to fetching

Other updates

• Remove old documentation