Aspen Discovery

Aspen Discovery Announces 20.09.00 Release and Notes

by Jessie Zairo on Jun 29, 2020

Aspen Discovery announced this week that the 20.09 release is available. This major release includes 48 improvements.

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

This release has seen the launch of Aspen Discovery to two new partners. Our thanks go out to the Central Kansas Library Consortium and Arcadia Public Library for being wonderful partners and helping to advance the state of Aspen Discovery.

Account Integration Updates

  • Add a new page to display the patron's library card with the option to display the library card as a barcode. The type of barcode can be specified within library settings. Also add the ability to allow patrons to define alternate library cards, i.e. a state library card. The patron can also be prompted to enter a PIN/Password for the alternate card.
  • Video Tutorial - Set up Library Card in Administration
  • Video Tutorial - Patron Account Digital Library Card
  • If a user has elected to bypass picking up a hold pickup location (and always using their home library), validate that the location is selected when attempting to place a hold and if not prompt them anyway.
  • Update My Preferences to always show the option to set if the Pickup Location is bypassed when placing a hold
  • Update display of hours to remove extra "and" from the display when a library is not closed during part of the day.
  • Add a new historic code to locations which can be used within the Aspen API calls for backwards compatibility during ILS migrations.

Administration Updates

  • Update Comparison to prefix comparison with section name for additional clarity when comparing two objects.
  • Update Comparison to show if colors and fonts are using the default setting when comparing two objects.
  • Update validation of IP Addresses to allow octets to be added with leading zeros. Also, let the user know if an IP address is not valid.
  • Clean up which options are displayed within Location settings based on the current ILS as well as which modules are enabled
  • Update cleanup tasks and reading history to run at 10 PM rather than 8 PM
  • Reduce the number of concurrent calls to update reading history to reduce the load on servers.

Google Books Integration Updates

  • Improve loading covers from google books by checking all ISBNs for a work prior to doing lookups by title and author.

Indexing Updates

  • Add a new Shelving Location Facet designed to store shelving locations without the current branch location. This is more general than the detailed location facet.
  • Add the ability to specify how Aspen determines Target Audiences within the Indexing Profile. There is a new setting called Determine Audience By with the following options:
    • By Bib Record Data
    • Item Collection using audience map
    • Item Shelf Location using audience map

    The final two options require the administrator to create a translation map named audience which is used to translate the values. The translation map can use regular expressions if appropriate.

  • When determining format for items Koha, add a check to see if the shelf location is within the format map. The order of checks is Shelf Location, Sub Location, Collection, Item Type. A successful match of one field will stop processing of further fields.
  • When processing Arlington index, load format from the 856z subfield to determine the format of eContent stored within Koha
  • Update to remove works during nightly indexing if all items on a record have been suppressed due to configuration changes.
  • When adding values to facets, skip blank entries.
  • Update to not delete grouped works from the database if they have no valid records

Koha Integration Updates

  • Updates for loading volume information from Koha to correctly identify related items and display volume within copies
  • When placing holds, display a more informative error message if the patron already has the title on hold.
  • When placing a hold, show how many hold the patron currently has and show the number of remaining holds when they have 3 or less.
  • When placing holds, if AllowHoldsOnPatronsPossessions is set to don't allow holds on checked out titles, show an appropriate error message.
  • When viewing checked out titles display a message for checked out titles that have been marked with claimed returned.
  • Add CSS identifiers to messaging settings to allow specific sections of the form to be disabled. Valid values are:
    • #messagingTable for the overall table
    • #messageType(number)Row for each row within the table i.e. #messageType1Row
    • #smsNoticeRow for the Notice that there could be charges for using SMS messaging
    • #smsNumberRow for the SMS number entry
    • #smsProviderRow for the SMS provider selection
  • When submitting messaging settings, remove any characters that are not digits to match what Koha expects.
  • When indexing records set anything with a Not For Loan Value (Item Subfield 7) that are greater than 0 to Not Holdable.
  • If FailedLoginAttempts is empty, do not show a message that the patron's account is locked
  • Update "Advanced Notice" label in Messaging Settings to "Advance notice"
  • When extracting a single record from Koha do not process deletes and do not set last update date within the profile.
  • When creating detailed locations for each item, ignore blank sublocations rather than labeling them as "null"

Novelist Integration Updates

  • Additional error checking when loading Novelist data to detect whether or not the primary_isbn is provided.

OverDrive Integration Updates

  • Allow a work idea to be specified on the command line when extracting a single work
  • Automatically detect and process any records that are not linked to a grouped work.

PDF and Files Attachment Updates

  • When multiple records group together, allow the patron to download any PDF or Grouped work from search results rather than forcing them to review each edition to look for downloads.

Search Result Updates

  • Correct display when showing results with varying numbers of linked lists (more than 5 and then less than 5).

Symphony Integration Updates

  • Update Symphony extract to behave similarly to other indexers based on MARC record export delivered to the server.
  • Update Symphony status processing to load statuses properly
  • Updates to work with version 6 of the API (login a patron, place holds, view holds, cancel a hold, lookup a patron by barcode)

Theming Updates

  • Add the ability to theme colors for panels when they are open and closed. If no colors are applied, the closed color will default to grey with black text and the open color will default to the secondary colors.
  • Update default colors for buttons to be set to the correct color rather than black when a new theme is created and button colors are not set.

Translation Updates

  • Allow translations that have not been done manually to be downloaded to a text file for translation using a bulk translation service like Google. Also allow bulk translation files to be reloaded to update or create translations for a specific language.
  • Make all text translatable on the place hold dialog. New terms are: max_holds_warning_message, hold_explanation, hold_notice_mail, hold_notice_phone, hold_notice_email, hold_notice_generic, hold_pickup_timing_message.
  • Make all text translatable when freezing and thawing holds and style thaw hold with alert-success.
  • Don't try to translate numeric values

Placard Updates

  • Update placard images to be responsive in mobile views

Other Updates

  • Add additional error handling
  • Cleanup when loading actions for records
  • Add a logged in class to the page body if the user is logged in and a logged out class to the page body if the user is not logged in.

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