AspenCon 2024 Schedule

Presentations and Lightning Talks will be streamed and available live to our virtual attendees! Visit @bywatersolutions on YouTube to watch live and access the presentations later! Please also see the schedule below for links for presentation materials made available by the speakers.

The workshops will focus on our in-person participants, but we will make the outcomes available post-conference.

We are looking forward to bringing the Aspen Community closer together!

All timings below are in MST.

Day 1: Wednesday, March 13

Day 1 Stream

8:30-9 am MST	Registration, refreshments, networking
9-9:40	Keynote Aspen: Past, Present, and Future We’ll be kicking off the inaugural AspenCon by sharing more about the path that brought us to this day and roads we’ll be building into Aspen’s future. You’ll learn more about Aspen’s first lines of code (written in 2010!) and all of the partnerships and friendships that were made between then and now. We'll talk about the vibrant Aspen community of libraries and developers as it exists today and ways that we can continue to nourish Aspen for continued success in the future. View slides here.	Mark Noble, Jordan Fields ByWater Solutions
9:40-10:15	Networking Icebreaker & Break
10:15-11	Setting up Consortia: Multiple Profiles, Library Systems, and Locations Yavapai Library Network has 59 libraries and needed a way to have a manageable collection of profiles in Aspen. Learn what their main takeways are from their setup experience, and how they approached setting up the profiles, library systems, and locations. View slides here.	Chanel Wheeler Yavapai Library Network
11-11:15	Lightning Talk: Build Your Own NetGalley in Aspen (virtual) Use Aspen's Website Builder and Collection Spotlights to create a subject-driven catalog display like NetGalley. In this session, you will learn how to lay out the page in Web Builder, replicate the sidebar subject list, and add auto-updating carousels based on your selected subjects. A discussion of ways to take the project further will be discussed along with things to keep in mind when setting up your new page. View slides here.	Amanda L. Goodman Darien Library
11:15-11:30	Lightning Talk: User Experience Testing 101 (virtual) In this session, you'll get a crash course of Aspen User Experience testing that Metropolitan Library System completed with staff and patron before implementing Aspen. View slides here.	Tricia Andrews, Devin McGhee Metropolitan Library System
11:30-12:15	Browse Categories as Digital Signage Learn how Nashville Public Library populates wall and shelf-end digital displays with Browse Categories by utilizing JavaScript and CSS. This enabled Nashville Public to save time, save money, and give staff editorial control of signage at their individual locations. View slides here.	Bryan Neil Jones Nashville Public Library
12.15-1:30 pm	Lunch break
1:30-2:15	LiDA Panel The panel will explore LiDA implementation, features, and its impact on patrons’ library experience. Panelists will share insight on app development and user experience and discuss the role of a companion app in a modern library setting.	Myranda Fuentes, Kirstien Kroeger ByWater Solutions Chanel Wheeler Yavapai Library Network Tara Wood SWAN Library Services
2:15-2:30	Lightning Talk: Creating a Kid's Catalog Get an inside look at McKinney Public Library's custom Kids Catalog. Learn how we implemented a custom theme, curated children's content, and animated the Aspen banner! View slides here.	Kellie Stephens McKinney Public Library System
2:30-3:15	Discovery for Prison Patrons The Colorado Department of Corrections has been using Aspen Discovery since Spring of 2022. Due to the unique environment those libraries and patrons are in, the AspenCat Team supporting them has utilized system settings in unconventional ways. This session will help explain some of the ways prison libraries differ from other types of libraries, and how the flexibility of Aspen Discovery has met those needs. View slides here.	Bob Bennhoff, Ben Wolfe Colorado Library Consortium
3:15-3:30	Break
3:30-4:15	The Best of Both Worlds: Using Aspen Discovery in an Academic Library within a Public Library Consortium Martin Luther College is a small college that shares its catalog with the public libraries in Minnesota’s Traverse des Sioux Library System. They migrated to Aspen and the Evergreen ILS in March 2023. They will share how they make Aspen work for our unique situation, including side loads of our unique e-book collections, EBSCO Discovery Service API integration, StackMap location assistance, and customization of almost every aspect of our site. Learn about how all of these pieces work together to make a better campus experience, with statistics for both print and digital materials up for the first three months of this school year over the same period last year. This session will be useful to academic library staff as well as anyone who’s interested in some of the features that can be integrated into Aspen. View slides here.	Linda Kramer Martin Luther College
4:15-4:30	Lightning Talk: Displaying a Public Koha Report in Aspen Discovery With a little Javascript magic, you too can easily display the results of a public Koha Report in Aspen Discovery. See how we used that to support a Seed Library in Rhode Island. View slides here.	Samuel Judd Maury Loontjens Memorial Library Lucas Gass ByWater Solutions
4:30-5:15	Aspen on the International Arena Learn how library teams in the UK and Ireland use Aspen and discover the differences compated to their American counterparts. This session will coverd different resources, e-countent sources, serives and focus on what can and cannot be done due to legal requirements concerning accessibility and data protection. View slides here.	Aude Charillon, Jacob O'Mara PTFS Europe

Dine-arounds:

Join a group of your choice at a local restaurant for a networking and peer learning opportunity in an informal setting. We will be posting a list of restaurants with topics and details on how to sign-up closer to the conference date.

Day 2: Thursday, March 14

**Workshops will be available only to in-person participants at Table Mountain Inn hotel**

Day 2 Stream

9-9:15 am MST	Morning Icebreaker
9:15-10	Palace Project and Aspen Discovery In this session we will discuss the integration between Palace Project and Aspen Discovery and how the integration helps patrons to use easily access eContent provided by the Palace Project market place, Biblioboard, Boundless, Cloud Library, as well as local collections that you can add to Palace Project. View slides here.	James English Ebooks + Community Engagement, Division of Lyrasis Mark Noble ByWater Solutions
10-10:45	Building Documentation for Aspen: Implementation and Beyond Aspen Discovery is an incredibly customizable system; its wealth of configuration choices means that each instance may look and act very differently than each other – and nobody uses everything Aspen offers! Aspen, as a software and a community, is rapidly growing, and new libraries may have documentation needs that are not yet met. Each library also has local circumstances that make it critical to adapt or write documentation that best suits the needs of the library's particular staff and patrons. So, how do you document a system in a way that fits the needs of your library, your patrons, and your staff? This session will focus on how a library using Aspen can build on a shared knowledge base to create documentation that is polished and accessible, and that fits the needs of your own users. Documentation that can then be shared back to the community! View slides here.	Galen Charlton, Lena Hernandez Equinox OLI
10:45-11	Break
11-11:15	Flip the Script: Solving consortium-world problems with the power of JavaScript (virtual) See how the Main Library Alliance has used JavaScript snippets to help enhance multi-site Aspen functionality across their consortium. Specific enhancement include: consortium permissions/restrictions, implementation of the ReachDeck accessibility tool, cross-site consortium menu, and UI tweaks. View slides here.	Mike Grgurev Main Library Alliance
11:15-12	How the Utilization of Author Authorities Helps the Automation of Record Grouping When authors go by more than one name or their name has different spellings or nicknames, the name variations can prevent titles from grouping. Aspen Author Authorities allow an organization to provide multiple variants to help Aspen recognize which titles should group together. Within Aspen, Author Authorities can be added manually and (if the institution has Koha) have LC Authorities extracted from the ILS. We will examining how our library's utilization of Aspen Author Authorities, how they affect grouping and possible updates to this functionality to improve grouping. View slides here.	Rhiana Compton, Keisha Poole Arlington Public Library
12-1:30 pm	Lunch break
1:30-2:30	The Future of Aspen Interactive Session Let's talk more about how Aspen development works and what the future of the Aspen development community looks like. Virtual and in person audience members will get to participate in the first ever Aspen Tournament of Features! View slides here. View Tournament of Features Results here.	Jordan Fields ByWater Solutions
2:30-2:45	Workshop setup
2:45-5	Aspen Dev Part 1 Learn how to setup a development environment and contribute code. We will have some easy developments to test out your skills on. Part 2 will take place on Friday, March 15 at 9:45 am. Workshop materials	Mark Noble, Kirstien Kroeger, Kodi Lein ByWater Solutions Jacob O'Mara PTFS Europe
	Google Tag Manager Are you looking to get more insight into how your patrons use Aspen? Using Google Tag Manager can give you statistics you can't get from the Aspen dashboards or Google Analytics alone. Answer questions like: How are search filters being used? What reader's advisory tools make the most impact? When your library can't agree on a browse category or label change, let the data settle your bets. In this workshop, we will get hands on and: Set up Google Tag Manager in your Aspen instance Go through the process of setting up a custom tag Discuss the questions you have about your patrons and share strategies to set up tags to collect the data you need To participate in the hands-on activities, you will need to have: Administrator access to your Aspen instance Google Analytics 4 account, with administrator access Some familiarity with Google Analytics, but you don't need to be an expert! Workshop materials	Tara Wood SWAN Library Services
	Expanding Community Website: CSS/JS Library and other community ideas What would you want to see on our community website? How do we promote sharing within the Aspen community and make the website a more valuable resource for all of us? Let's use this workshop to agree on some starting points and actually get on with them by editing the website together. Workshop findings	Aude Charillon PTFS Europe

Trivia Night!

We will be hosting a trivia night at a local restaurant, so join us, show off your knowledge, and win prizes!

Day 3: Friday, March 15

**Workshops and Roundtables will be available live only to in-person participants**

9-9:45 am MST	Roundtables
9:45-12	Aspen Dev Part 2 Learn how to setup a development environment and contribute code. We will have some easy developments to test out your skills on. Registration instructions will be announced closer to the event date.	Mark Noble, Kirstien Kroeger, Kodi Lein ByWater Solutions Jacob O'Mara PTFS Europe
	Scoping Aspen Discovery: Expanding Access with Tailored Content Unlock the mysteries of scoping catalogs. Whether you want to create a test instance, a kid’s catalog, a kiosk or just get a better understanding of what options are available, this session is for you. Workshop materials	Morgan Daigneault, Kalleen "Kal" Marquise ByWater Solutions
12 pm+	Conference Recap and open Aspen discussions