"The 24.09 release has contributions from six support organizations and a dozen Aspen developers. We love to see the Aspen Discovery community come together to work on library priorities such as customizing the sort order of formats, the ability to generate barcodes within Aspen, support for more self registration, and dozens of other improvements!" - Kalleen "Kal" Marquise, Aspen Implementation Specialist

This month's Aspen Discovery release is all about the amazing work that can be done when we work together as a community. The release contains contributions from six support organizations and over a dozen developers. Developments are only one piece of the community puzzle. The ideation of these developments came from support tickets, community conversations, ILS-specific meetings, and working together on a common goal of making Aspen the best open source discovery layer that it can be.

One highly requested feature was the ability for libraries to customize the sort order of formats in the grouped work display. Libraries that are happy with the way they are sorted now can keep the default alphabetical sort. But, for libraries that would prefer a custom approach, like sorting Large Print under Book, they are now able to do that.

The popularity of the Diagnostics button in the last few months spurred even more enhancements in this area. Now, libraries can also see how Aspen is determining audience with this button available in Staff View. This allows libraries and Aspen support organizations to have more transparency with the software to help troubleshoot and adjust records. We love that these types of features make Aspen that much easier to maintain and manage for library staff members!

Another new feature is the ability to generate printable barcodes within Aspen Discovery. Libraries expressed how they were often going out to more questionable websites for barcode generation and wanted a more secure way to perform barcode generation. An Aspen Discovery library added this feature and now it is available to all.

These are only a few of the dozens of enhancements in the new release. Be sure to check out the release notes to get the full scope of everything included in Aspen 24.09.

This release includes code contributions from:

• ByWater Solutions
• Grove For Libraries
• Howell Carnegie District Library
• Nashville Public Library
• PTFS-Europe
• Theke Solutions
• Minuteman Library Network (Minuteman)

Thanks to all of the contributors and the Aspen Discovery community for another successful release!

About Aspen Discovery

Aspen is a full-featured Discovery System that integrates with eContent and other third-party providers, giving your patrons comprehensive access to all of your materials in one place. Aspen combines your library catalog with e-content, digital archives, and enrichment from all major third-party providers. It also improves relevancy and ease of use, provides native reading recommendations, displays all formats of titles within one result (record grouping), and much more. With included features like web builder and mobile app (Aspen LiDA), Aspen was created to give users an improved experience over other Discovery systems, with less impact on library budgets.

For more information about Aspen please visit https://bywatersolutions.com/projects/aspen-discovery.