Discover Release Notes May 2025

Release Date: May 7, 2025

Update on "My Bookshelf" Release

We’re excited to bring you the new My Bookshelf feature, designed to make managing your reading lists easier and more enjoyable. However, to ensure the best possible experience for all our users, we have decided to delay the general release of this functionality. This extra time allows us to further test and refine the feature, so it meets our high standards for quality and reliability.

What does this mean for you?

You can still explore and review the new features with your staff right now.

  • Patrons can see which items saved to their “For Later” list or any list are available.

  • View 6 featured available titles, with a link to see all available items.

  • Search options: Author (default), Format, Language, Location, Title, Publication Date, Series, Concept.

  • Filter by “Available Now” or view all items.

  • Format availability icons help you quickly identify your preferred formats.

Try it Out Today

Barcode: 21009654321987

Password: 54321

Thank you for your patience and partnership as we work to make your library experience even better.

User Management and Active Directory Reminders

User Management

The new User Management feature rolled out with the last release week to all libraries. As a part of this new feature, any legacy admin accounts (non-email based accounts) were deprecated and will no longer grant access to the Vega Discover Staff UI. You can reach out to Customer Support for help regaining access to the Discover Staff UI and they will create a new user for you that is associated with your email address for security and verification purposes. If you created showcase content with your old admin account and can no longer access those showcases you can also have an email address associated with this old account to regain access to managing the lists and searches for these showcases.

Users created in LX Starter or Promote cannot have Discover permissions assigned to them at this time in the user management interface. Users created in Discover cannot have LX Starter or Promote permissions assigned to them at this time in the user management interface. This ability is coming soon, but is not ready yet. So please keep this in mind when creating users and requesting access. If a staff member needs to be able to manage in both LX Starter and/or Promote AND Discover before the new user management interface is ready, please open a Support case and we will be happy to assist.

Active Directory

Active Directory Staff User access for Vega Discover Staff User Management has been enabled for 5 libraries and will soon be enabled for the rest of our Consortia Hosted Polaris Customers, followed by our other Hosted Libraries. You will receive notification when your library has been enabled.

If you are a Self-Hosted Polaris library see this solution for how to begin the enablement process: How to get Active Directory User Management Enabled for Vega Discover as a Polaris Self-Hosted Customer.

Accessibility Improvements

  1. Screen reader users will now hear when a link opens in a new tab, making navigation clearer.

  2. Event headings have been updated for better screen reader navigation. Users can now move directly from heading to heading. The Showcase block title for events is marked as an H2 heading, while the event date and month are marked as H3 headings.

  3. The footer link's focus state now displays a clear outline on all four sides, making it easier to see for both keyboard and mouse users. Libraries using custom footer code may experience different results.

BUG FIXES

Deleted Agent and Concept Links

A problem was fixed where an agent or concept that was removed from a bibliographic record in the ILS was not being deleted fully from facets, concepts or contributor linked data showcases when it should be.

Showcase Link View of Items

Fixed an issue where using "Copy Showcase Link" prevented more than 40 items from displaying.

Release Date: May 21, 2025

Relevancy Improvements for searches that include punctuation

This change requires a post deployment step and will appear in a day or two.

Commas in Numerical Values

Searching for strings that have numerical values including commas or dots return the same results with or without the inclusion of these characters.

EX: 20,000 leagues = 20.000 leagues = 20000 leagues

Searches for its vs. it's

Searches for strings that include the term its or it's now return the same results.

EX: "It's a wonderful life" = "Its a wonderful life"

Hyphenated words

Terms with hyphens are treated as two or more words when searching/matching instead of as a single word.

EX: Catch-22 = Catch 22

Improved Visibility for Focused Elements

We previously enhanced accessibility for keyboard users by making focused elements easier to see around the item cover. Now, it also includes Syndetics widgets when viewing the Full Resource Card.

  • The outline surrounds all four sides of the cover.

  • The outline is offset to improve visibility.

Post Deployment Action

The following changes for phrase searching of secondary fields and 6xx Agent indexing require a post deployment step and a full re-index of metadata. Here are the instructions to run a re-ingest. If you have questions, please open a support case.

Avoid extraction jobs at 2:00 AM Eastern Standard Time or 3:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time (7:00 AM UTC) because a conflicting extraction job runs at this time.

Phrase Searching of Secondary Fields in All Index

This change requires the post deployment step outlined above

This indexing change phrase indexes our secondary fields metadata so that you can search for specific phrases in indexed data found in indexed note (and other secondary index) fields: 505, 500, 586, 59X, 250, 260, etc.

Changes for 6xx Agent Indexing

This change requires the post deployment step outlined above

Persons as a Subject indexed as Topics not Contributors

6xx 'people' will now be indexed as Topics instead of how they were previously indexed as Contributors. This will remove persons as a subject from the Contributors linked data showcase and Persons facet and instead place them in the Topics linked data showcase and Concepts facet.

Publishers no longer indexed as Contributors

Publishers (7xx $e publisher or pbl) are no longer considered Contributors will be removed from the Contributors linked data showcase and Persons facet. Publishers will remain in the Publisher facet, will continue to be used for agent matching for visual materials, and will continue to display as expected in the edition table.

BUG FIXES

My Bookshelf Availability Now Works Smoothly for Accounts with Many Lists

We fixed a bug that caused the search to freeze for accounts with over 100 book lists or individual lists containing more than 100 items. Users with large numbers of lists can now search and switch between tabs without the page becoming unresponsive.

  • A loading icon will appear to indicate when a search is in progress.

Expired Vega Program Events are Hidden

We resolved an issue where selecting Vega Program events with a start date in the past would cause expired events to still appear. Now, expired events are hidden from the published view to keep your event listings current.