Aspen Discovery Announces 20.18.00 Release and Notes

by Emily Fowler on Dec 22, 2020

Aspen Discovery announced this week that the 20.18.00 release is available. This release includes 1 new functionality and 13 other updates to the Aspen Discovery system.

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

We're excited to wrap up our 2020 release schedule by bringing our libraries improved statistics and reporting so they can see how Aspen helps to drive usage of their collections in the coming year.

New Functionality

Statistics and Reporting

• Add graphing of statistics stored within Aspen Discovery.
• Add the ability to track statistics based on the active server instance so each member of a consortium can see their own statistics.

Usage Dashboard Additions

• Add a display for the number of genealogy searches done within Aspen.
• Add a display for the number of page views by authenticated users.
• Add a display for the number of page views by bots.
• Add tracking and display for the number of sessions started within Aspen.

Updates to Existing Functionality

Account Integration Updates

• Correct placing volume level holds when more than 3 volumes exist for a record.

Administration Updates

• Add a confirmation prompt before deleting roles.

Axis360 Integration Updates

• Correct errors when adding new titles to the Axis360 collection.

Genealogy Updates

• Add additional columns to people to define partially known birth and death dates as well as marriage dates.

Health Check Updates

• Correct units of display for memory size. (committed by SWAN Library Consortium)

Indexing Updates

• When errors are logged during indexing, prefix them with "ERROR: " to make them easier to find.
• Correct applying specific eContent scopes to locations rather than using the default library settings.
• Load the lexile measure from the MARC 521 field when available. Subfield A should contain the score and Subfield B should contain the word Lexile.

Materials Request Updates

• Update default materials request statuses for new installations to ensure they don't have duplicates.
• Update the graph shown on the summary report to be displayed using the new graphing library and remove the old graphing library.

OverDrive Integration Updates

• Allow multiple OverDrive collections to be defined and indexed within a single Aspen instance.
• Update indexing for magazines to display magazines as eMagazines and show the edition statement properly.

Sierra Integration Updates

• Use the correct character set parser when loading marc records from the API.
• Allow overriding renewal failure message for Interlibrary Loan Material.

Symphony Integration Updates

• Improve the speed of loading volumes file and do not process the volumes file if it has not changed since the last time the indexer ran.
• Don't log long volume names as errors to ensure the extract continues normally.
• Allow PINs to be alphanumeric and up to 60 characters in length when resetting pins.

Theme Updates

• Correct theming of header colors that changed in 20.17.

Website Indexing Updates

• Additional error trapping when indexing web pages to account for invalid links within the site being indexed.
• Update indexing for locally created content to delete content more precisely.
• Optimize full indexing of websites to not delete records when all pages are deleted as part of the full index.

User List Updates

• Clean up logic when scoping lists to libraries and locations.
• When determining which lists to index, look at users by permission rather than by role.