In your upgrade to Aspen Q4.25

What’s version Q4.25?

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 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 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 25.06.02

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 July, August and September 2025 for links to videos, usually under the first agenda item. You can also check our own What’s On Our Mind.

Contents

• • Administration
  • Promoting collections
  • Search experience
  • User account
  • Web builder
  • Aspen LiDA

Administration

• • A Plain Text Translatable Block to allow localized Push Notification Messages and Titles has been added.
  • You can now set up ILS users as Administrators based on the ILS Username rather than barcode.
  • Documentation links now automatically open in new tabs, allowing administrators to reference help without losing their current configuration work.
  • For better administrator experience, Object comparisons now show human-readable names instead of numeric IDs.
  • The “Compare” button is now disabled until at least two objects have been selected for comparison; an error continues to display if more than two objects are selected.

• • The following objects can now be restored after their deletion: User Lists; Basic Pages; Custom Pages (Portal Pages); Custom Forms; Web Resource Pages; Web Resources; Image Uploads (hard-deleting removes the file from the server); File Uploads (hard-deleting removes the file from the server); Placards.
  • Patrons may choose “Opt Out of Soft Deletion” to permanently delete them immediately

   

  • Grouped Work Display Options lists options alphabetically and sections are collapsed by default for easier navigation.
  • When adding new rows to tables within an object, the page now automatically scrolls to show the new row, and empty unsaved rows can be deleted directly without needing to save first.
  • Deleting saved table rows now displays a modal to ask for confirmation of the deletion.

   

  Promoting collections

  • Collection Spotlights settings interface is standardized to align with other settings in Aspen, including updated option labels and descriptions.
  • ‘Is Like’ option is removed from the UI when the user is setting milestone criteria based on list ID.
  • You will able to include progress for milestones to campaigns after user has enrolled.
  • Add Progress button is disabled when a manual milestone is complete and not set to be able to add progress beyond 100%.
  • Permission logic no longer incorrectly check users with “Administer All Collection Spotlights” for a home library when creating a new Collection Spotlight.
  • An administrator can now enroll users in campaigns.
  • There is now an option to add extra credit activities to campaigns. These activities have goals and rewards but do not count towards the campaign completion.
  • There is now an option to highlight campaigns that are open to enrollment within the campaign highlights banner.
  • You will be able to restrict campaigns by location.
  • Toast notifications have been added to Community Engagement campaign milestones progress.