In your upgrade to Aspen Q3.25
Last updated on: 11th July 2025| 11th July 2025 | Bernard Scaife | Aspen Discovery
What’s version Q3.25?
There is a new release of Aspen Discovery every month. The version name for these includes the year and month – for example, 25.06 is the version released in June 2025. We will continue referring to the monthly Aspen releases in our upgrade notes.
However, we wanted to officialise the fact we are running a quarterly upgrade cycle for all Open Fifth customers. Our development team, in collaboration with the teams at ByWater Solutions and Theke, maintain the quarterly branch your system is upgraded to. They make sure any security-related bugs are backported to this quarterly version. And this maintained quarterly version now has a name of its own!
- end of July 2025: upgrade to Q3.25 – for the third quarter of the year 2025.
- end of October 2025: upgrade to Q4.25
- end of January 2026: upgrade to Q1.26
- end of April: upgrade to Q2.26
What’s new since version 25.04.01
Here are our highlights from the new features to look out for after your upgrade. We tend to include the new features we think will be most useful for library teams while leaving aside the bug fixes!
- To view everything that’s new, check out the full release notes for each version on the Aspen Help Centre.
- To watch demonstrations of some of these new features, we recommend checking the Aspen Community Gathering agendas for May and June 2025 for links to videos, usually under the first agenda item. You can also check our own What’s On Our Mind.
Contents
Administration
- An expandable side bar makes the admin page easier to use and the settings search has been improved.
- Improved validation reduces the possibility of exceeding character limits in various settings which would otherwise cause issues
Copy summary updates
It is now possible to suppress holds from displaying against titles which only have “On Order” copies attached. To do this, configure the “Show Hold and Copy Counts” setting.
- Related setting: Primary Configuration > Library Systems > Show Hold and Copy Counts
Options:
- Never
- Only for unavailable titles
- For available and unavailable with title holds
- For available and unavailable with and without title holds
Koha
- Users will be now warned that an account will be locked after a certain number of unsuccessful login attempts
- If a renewal error occurs which is unknown to Aspen, it will now display the relevant Koha error message in Aspen.
- Borrowers’ circulation history will now update correctly each night.
- The display record in a grouped title will now prioritise the use of an available record within the set as a “display title”.
- Users with frozen or expired accounts will now be blocked from placing Koha holds via Aspen
- A new option is available which can be set to prevent users who are expired from logging in to Aspen.
New setting: Primary Configuration > Library Systems > Prevent Login for Expired Cards
Search updates
Several improvements have been made here:
- The presence or absence of apostrophes should no longer affect the number of results returned
- Proper handing of parentheses in names. For example: “Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples)” and regardless of presence or absence of quotation marks.
- Escaping certain special characters before searching. For example: +-!
Grove, who sponsored these, have also made a video called Improvements to Searching and Finding titles with Contractions
Side loads updates
It is now possible to divide out the administration of side loads on the basis of the owning library so that they can only edit and manage their own side loads. There are two new permissions and two new settings available:
- New settings:
- Side Load Collections > Owning Library
- Side Load Collections > Sharing
- New permissions:
- For available and unavailable with title holds
- For available and unavailable with and without title holds
Aspen LiDA
In the “My Account” section, various improvements to the sorting of checkouts and holds along have been made so that it is more aligned with the experience you get in Aspen Discovery. For example, when using Scan & Go, it will give you some feedback to show you that you have successfully checked out each item. See Grove’s video Improvements to Scan and Go
