Aspen Discovery
Aspen Discovery 23.12.00 Release Notes
by Mark Noble on Dec 20, 2023
Aspen Discovery announced this week that the 23.12.00 release is now available.
This release contains contributions from:
- ByWater Solutions
- Theke Solutions
- PTFS Europe
- Nashville Public Library
- CW/Mars
- Equinox Open Library Initiative
- Lake Agassiz Regional Library
Thanks to all the contributors!!!
23.12.00 Release Notes
Account Updates
- Add a new toggle within My Preferences to allow patrons to disable the display of Checkout and Hold Actions within search results and full record pages.
New Settings
- Your Preferences > Show Checkouts and Holds in Results
API Updates
- In User API, getPatronProfile will now return the Linked Account settings for the user's patron type.
- In User API, added disableAccountLinking to disable account linking for given user.
- In User API, added enableAccountLinking to enable account linking for given user.
Axis 360 / Boundless Updates
- Update Axis 360 to Boundless
- Fix issue where unavailable titles were throwing errors during indexing.
Custom Forms Update
- A button has been added to allow users to go directly to the submission page instead of getting them through the "Edit" -> "View submissions" path.
Display Updates
- Added the ability for users to choose whether to display the language and display settings just in the burger menu or in both the burger menu and page header.
New Settings
- Primary Configuration > Library Systems > Show Language and Display Settings in Page Header
- Primary Configuration > Locations > Show Language and Display Settings in Page Header
Email Updates
- Add tracking for emails that were sent successfully as well as emails that failed within the Aspen Usage Dashboard.
Evergreen Updates
- Quote patron barcode when looking up users by barcode to allow non-numeric barcodes to work.
- When renewing titles, send the opac_renewal flag.
- Update "Holds cannot be placed on this title" message when placing holds and make it translatable.
- Use unapi rather than supercat to receive bib records during indexing.
- If a rate limit response (502) is detected, wait 1 second before extracting another bib record.
- Add a configuration option to Indexing Profiles for the maximum number of retries after a failed bib fetch from Evergreen.
- Add a configuration option for a number of milliseconds to pause execution after each bib fetched from Evergreen.
- Add a configuration option for a number of threads to use when fetching bibs from Evergreen.
New Settings
- ILS Integration > Indexing Profiles > Evergreen Settings > Num Retries for failed bib lookups
- ILS Integration > Indexing Profiles > Evergreen Settings > Num Milliseconds to pause after Bib lookups
- ILS Integration > Indexing Profiles > Evergreen Settings > Number of Extraction Threads
Hoopla Updates
- If the Hoopla module is not active, show an invalid record message when navigating directly to an inactive record.
Linked Account Updates
- Removing a managing linked account in Aspen Discovery will now send an app notification.
- Adding a linked account in Aspen LiDA will now display an alert in Aspen Discovery.
- Removing a managing linked account in Aspen LiDA will now display an alert in Aspen Discovery, as well as send an app notification.
Koha Updates
- Improve performance of loading Checkouts from Koha.
- For Messaging Preferences the Digest checkbox will only be selectable if at least one of the transport methods have been selected for that row.
- When updating Messaging Preferences to Koha, the Digest options will now all properly update.
- Do not send read only fields to the Koha APIs when updating contact information.
OverDrive Updates
- Eliminate common subtitles that interfere with proper grouping when grouping OverDrive titles. Any subtitle including "Book Club", "Award Winner", or "Read with Jenna" will be ignored.
- Update OverDrive to Libby or a custom defined product name
New Settings
- OverDrive > Scopes > Reader Name
Palace Project Updates
- Note: Palace Project is not ready for production use yet!
- Create module for indexing Palace Project titles.
- Add settings and scopes for indexing Palace Project titles.
- Display Palace Project titles in search results and full record screens.
- Display book covers from Palace Project.
- Show previews for Palace Project titles when available.
New Settings
- System Administration > Modules > Palace Project
- Palace Project Section
Quick Poll Results Updates
- An option has been added to allow users to decide whether to show results to patrons who are not logged in, as well as to choose whether to show graphs, tables or both.
- Now,if the name field is completed for unauthenticated users, it will be completed on the form instead a blank space.
- If an authenticated user fills in the name field, then the submission form will have the name that the user entered in the form instead of the username.
- Fixed Quick Poll submissions so that blanks are not displayed instead of suggestions if they were deleted.
New Settings
- Web Builder > Quick Polls > Show Results To Patrons
Record Display Updates
- Correct showing MARC Holdings for the local library before MARC Holdings from other libraries.
Search Updates
- When determining search relevancy in title searching, de-prioritize series matches and increase relevancy where the first word matches the start of the search term.
- When determining boosts for number of checkouts, number of holdings, and formats, cap the maximum boost applied to avoid titles that have a large number of copies (like classics) from being over boosted.
- Apply lower boosting when not searching by Keyword.
- When determining sortable call number, ignore eContent.
- When converting a Start of Title search to a Keyword search ensure that sorting returns to Best Match.
- When searching by Start of Title search both with and without leading articles.
- Ensure that when authors are searched by keyword that the order of names does not matter.
- When doing Keyword searching check de-emphasize single word searches in the author index.
- When doing Keyword searching check de-emphasize single word searches in the series index.
- Update relevancy of subjects
- Reduce the relevancy of contributors when searching by author.
- Properly handle quoted subject searches.
- Updates to Keyword searching.
- Fix creating search tests.
Sideload Updates
- Fixes Side Load indexing to allow titles identified as Graphic Novels in MARC metadata to appear in Aspen as format eComic
Sierra Updates
- Properly validate old PIN when resetting password.
- When importing lists from Sierra, restore the list if it was previously deleted.
- Preload MARC Holdings using Sierra DNA to optimize making API calls only if holdings exist for a title.
- Updates to allow login with barcode and username.
- Updates to allow login when no expiration date is set for a patron's account.
SSO Updates
- When ending a masquerade session initiated by a user logged in via single sign-on, reapply necessary session variables to prevent the main user from being logged out as well.
Symphony Updates
- Add email confirmation to custom Symphony self registration forms if email is required.
- Add a class to Symphony Message Settings Alerts to Receive column so it can be easily hidden.
Translations Updates
- A control point has been added to check if ,when importing translations, strings encoding is UTF-8
VDX Updates
- Do not allow expired or barred patrons to place VDX Requests.
Other Updates
- When checking available disk space account for the size of the database backup rather than using a fixed minimum.
- Do not show Export to CSV option when a table has no entries in it.
- Hide some search indexing options that no longer should be changed within System Variables.
- Correct loading location information for Aspen LiDA when multiple themes are available.
- If an enum/select field has been set as Required, add the Required attribute to the field.
- Added role="button" to the Get More Results chevron for results for Course Reserves, Events, Lists, Open Archives, Search Home, and Websites.
- Fix Access Online button redirects when multiple variations are present on a record
- Optimize loading translations from the Community Server.
- Fix error when updating themes with certain locked values
- Update Square payments to ensure the idempotency_key is a string.
- Disallow robots from crawling to the linked Excel view of data
- Create initial Docker configuration so Aspen can be run within a container.
- Updates for setting up default sites.
- Upgrade PHP and MariaDB when installed on CentOS 7
- Updates to install process to ensure Apache and MySQL restart.
Aspen LiDA Updates
- Fixed a bug where the Self Check Scanner would crash on Android.
- Fixed a bug where an id on a browse category could result in a -1 value.
- When changing formats on the Grouped Work Screen always re-fetch the copies to populate accurate data when placing a hold.
- In efforts to reduce initial load time when logging in, translation data will now only load the user's preferred language, if set, or else English.
- On the Linked Accounts screen users can now disable or re-enable account linking.
- If patron type rules regarding linked accounts have been set, the app will now respect them in displaying UI text and buttons on the Linked Accounts screen.
Watch the 23.12.00 Aspen Updates in an Instant Recording
Watch a short highlight video of the some of the new features available in 23.12.00
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