Aspen Discovery Announces 20.06.00 Release and Notes

by Jessie Zairo on May 4, 2020

Aspen Discovery announced this week that the 20.06 release is available. This major release includes a new feature, 17 improvements, and several minor bug fixes.

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

I'm very excited by the new "While You Wait" functionality in Aspen Discovery. We're confident that giving patrons the opportunity to discover additional titles will be very popular with patrons and library staff. This new enhancement will help increase the usage of library collections.

While You Wait Feature

Administration updates

• Add help manual within Aspen, the initial table of contents has been created with a few pages within it.

Bookcover updates

• Optionally allow loading book covers from canceled ISBNs (020$z). This is enabled by the System Variables for the entire Aspen instance.

CloudLibrary updates

• Update CloudLibrary to automatically login the user when reading or listening to checked out titles
• Add a check if the user has excessive fines in Koha and if so block them from borrowing CloudLibrary titles

Hoopla updates

• Update Hoopla extract to run continuously

Indexing updates

• Extract MPAA rating in additional cases

Koha integration updates

• Extract volume information from Koha during indexing
• Allow patrons to disable auto-renewal of checkouts
• Respect Koha OPAC suppression (MARC field 942n)

Recommendations

• Show while you wait for suggestions after placing holds and within holds list
• Show you might also like suggestions in list of checked out titles and reading history
• While You Wait functionality can be disabled by the library
• Limit recommended titles based on MPAA rating if applicable
• Fixes for loading recommendations when the user has a large number of titles they have rated or in their reading history

Record updates

• Allow PDFs to be deleted from records

Statistic updates

• Add display of the number of patrons that have logged into Aspen
• Add tracking and display of numbers of PDF downloads

Other changes

• Load Staff View dynamically when it is viewed to improve performance
• Within the administration area, tables now use sticky headers so you can more easily see what each column is
• Check the size of database backups as part of setup validation
• Refactor AJAX calls to standardize json encoding
• Site-specific indexing rules for Arlington using Koha