Findings from the YorCat Aspen pilot
About the recent pilot of Aspen in YorCat libraries.
Despite having recently come together as a regional system using the Koha LMS, the YorCat region (Yorkshire and the Humber) gamely agreed to get stuck into another project. Over the past few months, YorCat colleagues have been helping the Resource Discovery team at NHS England to pilot Aspen Discovery.
Aspen is Open Source and provided by Open Fifth who already supply several regions with Koha. According to Open Fifth, Aspen is “designed around your users’ browsing experience. This highly featured Discovery tool integrates the library catalogue, e-content, websites…databases and more…via a single search.” Aspen also has an accompanying app called LiDA. YorCat agreed to help us assess what all of the fuss is about!
The Aspen “proof of concept” was a 6 month project involving 5 services in the YorCat region. The project group were tasked with the following aims:
Aims
-
Test whether the Aspen interface and LiDA app offer significant benefits to end-users over the existing YorCat OPAC interface
-
Explore whether the Aspen interface offers significant benefits for library staff and services e.g. through a website presence
-
Explore how the Aspen interface would fit within the wider national infrastructure
Due to time constraints some elements were out of scope of the project. This included integration of resources which do not currently have usable APIs, single sign-on with NHS OpenAthens and live promotion for all users.
The Aspen sites!
Over the course of 3-4 months, the group attended a number of workshops on how to develop an Aspen site. Although any future implementation would include an agreed template, we thought that it was important that the group have free rein to develop a site that they liked which we can then test with end-users. We were really impressed with their creativity and dedication to the cause!
Please do take a look at the sites and do a few practice searches:
Initial evaluation and feedback
Following the completion of the sites, we undertook an initial evaluation with the library staff from the pilot sites. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. The following features and functionality were specifically highlighted:
-
The search system and platform for end-users, the way results are displayed and the possibility that Aspen offers a “one stop shop”
-
The LiDA app, especially self-issue feature and electronic library card
-
Ease of which you can download and start using the app
-
Ability to customise elements for your local service, including additional resources, carousels and placards
-
Library service web-page functionality
-
The ability to “scrape” useful websites for results e.g. the NHS website or Patient.info
It was also noted that the Koha, EBSCOHost and EDS integrations worked well and that the LibKey linking was successful. Above all the BMJ Best Practice integration was a hugely impressive feature. Open Fifth have also provided assurance that it would be possible to integrate further resources beyond the pilot stage.
Of course, there is always room for improvement and there are further developments that we would require to pursue Aspen further. In particular, we would need single sign-on with NHS OpenAthens. The pilot group also found it more difficult than expected to navigate and make changes in the site administration.
Next Steps
The initial feedback has been very positive but there is still lots to do. Most importantly, we need to let end-users loose on the sites! Later in the summer we will do some end user testing and we will report those findings to you in due course. We will be really interested to find out whether library users like Aspen as much as the project group do. The findings of the Aspen evaluation will be used as part of our user research for the forthcoming procurement of the national discovery infrastructure.
If you have any questions or feedback about the project, please contact Becky Williams or Lucy Reid.