Category: Aspen

Aspen Previews

Aspen

We’ve been working on our Aspen implementation behind the scenes, and now it’s time to give you a sneak preview! We have four Aspen Preview sessions coming up in May, two hours on Zoom. These sessions are aimed at staff who work with patrons of all ages, and anyone else who wants to see the new public catalog and how it’s going to work. We’ll walk you through all the ways that patrons will browse through new titles and lists curated by library staff, how search works, how Aspen groups different formats and editions, how patrons will be able to preview, place holds and checkout OverDrive titles right from the catalog and much more!

Each session is being recorded, and they are likely to vary somewhat as we make progress. I will send a message to NOBLE-Info when the recording is available, and will change the Registration link below to the recording link. We’re recording the presentation and not the questions and discussion that follows, but we have the details from that and will be posting the questions and answers and summaries of the discussion.

Tuesday May 6 2-4 PM Aspen Preview 1 Recording
Thursday May 8 10 AM-12 PM Aspen Preview 2 Recording
Friday May 16 10 AM-12 PM Registration
Tuesday May 20 2-4 PM Registration

NOBLE to move to Aspen Discovery System

Aspen, Catalog, Executive Director's Report

NOBLE patrons, students, and users will soon have a new way to access materials in NOBLE libraries and to manage their Evergreen accounts.

NOBLE members voted in January to approve a move to the Aspen Discovery System, which will replace the NOBLE public catalog to provide patron access to NOBLE libraries’ collections. The Evergreen staff client will continue to use the native Evergreen staff catalog.

NOBLE will join three other Massachusetts networks – CW MARS, CLAMS and Minuteman – that have already implemented Aspen. The discovery system will provide a more modern and dynamic entry point to our collections with a speedy search and tools to allow libraries to better highlight their collections.

We are still working out details with our support vendor, including a timeline, but we expect the implementation to happen this spring. We will be offering an introductory Aspen session in our upcoming workshop schedule and will schedule more in-depth workshops once a timeline is set.

In the meantime, if you want to take a peek at how Aspen works for other networks, I encourage you to visit the other Massachusetts Aspen implementations:

Much more information will be forthcoming. Feel free to let us know if you have questions.