Aspen Discovery Announces 20.10.00 Release and Notes

by Jessie Zairo on Jul 9, 2020

Aspen Discovery announced this week that the 20.10 release is available. This major release includes 28 improvements.

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

I'm pleased to continue to improve our ILS integration with Aspen Discovery. This release features quite a few enhancements to both Koha and Symphony integration which gives additional power to patrons.

Account Integration Updates

• Updates to allow long passwords up to 60 characters.
• Error checking when displaying a user's ratings if the same title has been rated by a user multiple times.
• Check the Historic Location Code when changing hold location within the account interface for backward compatibility.
• Additional error checking during when initiating masquerade mode after the initial login if the user has never logged into Aspen.
• Ensure Aspen checks each barcode once when logging in to Aspen for better performance.

Events Integration Updates

• Update searches for events to only show upcoming events, the calendar will still show all events.

Indexing Updates

• Allow records to be excluded from records owned or records to include for both libraries and locations based on the location code and/or the sub-location code. In the example below, all files with a location of ABC, but not a sub-location of DEF will be recorded as being owned by the library. Any records with a location of ABC and a sublocation of DEF will be included in library search results. Any records with a location not equal to XYZ will also be included in library search results. All exclusion fields can use regular expressions for matching.

• Added a new setting to library settings that controls which values Aspen shows within the Library System and Branch facets. Administrators can change the setting by visiting Library Systems > Searching > Search Facets.
  The setting defaults to on. If it is turned off, all libraries and branches show in the facets.

• When indexing records check the format table to see if the format should be nonholdable and if so mark the entire record as nonholdable which causes the Place Hold button to not show.
• When indexing eContent stored in Koha for Arlington, make the shelf location Online rather than the source of the record.
• Add error when scopes cannot be loaded at the start of indexing due to database updates not having been run.

Koha Integration Updates

• Allow patrons to update their username (userid) from My Preferences. To enable this functionality, the ILS must support usernames and Allow Patrons to Update Their Username must be enabled within Library Systems > ILS/Account Integration > User Profile.

• Once enabled, the patron can update their username within My Preferences.

• When updating contact information mark fields that are both required and not needed as hidden fields.
• Automatically load existing reading history from Koha when a user opts into recording Reading History in Aspen.
• Automatically copy covers that have been uploaded to Koha. Aspen will use the covers that were uploaded in Koha for the display of records in Aspen.
• Add display of patron barcode to the self-registration confirmation screen if provided by Koha.
• Hide Time To Reshelve from Indexing Profiles when using Aspen with Koha.

NoveList Integration Updates

• Add covers to the Similar Titles from Novelist section

Placard Updates

• Add the ability to determine if a particular trigger word must be an exact match of the search term or if the word can match a portion of the search term. Matching a portion of the search term is the new default. In the example below, a search for "online legal help" would display the placard, but a search for "wills and trusts" would not.

Record PDF Updates

• PDFs can now be viewed online in addition to being downloaded.

• Statistics are available to see how many users view PDFs and how many total PDFs are viewed.

Record Grouping Updates

• Normalization of additional subtitles for improved matching of more titles. (novel, an ... novel, ... series, ... book #). All systems should force a new full extract from all sources.

Symphony Integration Updates

• Update to work with version 6 of the API (load checkouts, renew checkouts, view fines, view account summary for holds, checkouts, fines, and expiration)
• Update indexing to remove old full exports after they have been processed to avoid reprocessing exports.
• Update indexing to process delta files exported from Symphony and delete them once processing has been done.

Translation Updates

• Add additional translations for hold success messages from all eContent sources as well as the ILS. New messages are: cloud_library_hold_success, ils_hold_success, ils_hold_success_position, ils_hold_success_total_remaining_holds, millennium_hold_success, ils_hold_failed, koha_hold_failed, ils_title_already_on_hold, rbdigital_hold_success.

Documentation Updates

• Add information about using Wikipedia for author enrichment

Other Updates

• Add Yandex to list of bots that are excluded by robots.txt

For More Information

Jessica Zairo
Marketing & Outreach Coordinator
ByWater Solutions
bywatersolutions.com
Phone:(888)900-8944