News

The SWAN Board election process received two self-nominations for the two open board positions. Since there are the two candidates who volunteered for the two open seats, SWAN will not have to conduct an election for the 2026 cycle. Congratulations to the two library directors. You can read their submitted statements below. Tammy Sheedy, Berwyn Public Library & Stickney-Forest View Public Library...

Hoopla Maintenance May 6 (1:00–4:00 a.m. CT) Hoopla will undergo planned maintenance on May 6 from 1:00–4:00 a.m. CT to support infrastructure improvements that enhance performance, uptime, and long‑term reliability. During this maintenance window: Hoopla access will be temporarily unavailable Patrons may see login error messages (these are not related to accounts or passwords) Usage and...

Next month, we will be migrating our BLUEcloud Analytics platform to a Private Intelligence Server. Our current Analytics platform is shared with other SirsiDynix customers, so some features are locked down. Moving to a SWAN-exclusive environment will allow us to manage and monitor the Analytics workspace with more control and insight. What This Means for You The Environment The new environment...

Early registration is open for our annual Expo event for SWAN library staff. Expo will take place on August 21st at the NIU Naperville Meetings and Conference Center. You can register yourself and your colleagues. The registration fee is $45 per attendee, which is waived for speakers. Register for the 2026 SWAN Expo We plan to post the full session schedule on May 22nd, 2026. If you have an idea...

The Aspen 26.04 release is live. It includes the following features and fixes, and the Palace Project is now integrated into Aspen! Note: Aspen indexes are running long following this release, we expect they will catch up by this afternoon. Palace Project integration The Palace Project integration within the Aspen library catalog and SWAN Libraries+ mobile app brings the eRead Illinois digital...

The April 2026 (January- March, 2026) Quarterly Billing is complete, and the invoices and checks will be mailed shortly. Documentation is available to help guide member library staff through the Billing Summary workbook as well as the detail statement reports folder accessible in BlueCloud Analytics Shared Reports. Library Directors have been provided with BCA login credentials. If you are a...

The MessageBee portal and notification service will be down for maintenance this coming Saturday, April 18th, starting at 3:00 p.m. and lasting for approximately 10 hours. Access to the MessageBee portal, including notification preferences, configuration, and reports, will not be available during this time. This will also affect the patron notifications scheduled to go out during this time. We are...

The SWAN staff will be attending an in-service day April 10th. We will monitor systems throughout the day, but any requests will be responded to next week Monday.

The Aspen 26.03 release is live. This release includes the following features and fixes. New Features Picture book format The web catalog and app will now display a Picture Book format. This format will appear in search results and it will be a filter option in the Format filter. The Board Book format will be priortized over Picture Book. Locked filters You can now lock your filters in the catalog...

SWAN's annual Expo event will take place on August 21st at the NIU Naperville Meetings and Conference Center. We have begun planning sessions for the event, and we'd like to invite anyone interested in presenting a session or leading a discussion to submit their ideas. Our session proposal form is available on our SWAN Expo information page and is open to all. The proposal form will be open...

Update April 13th, 2026: Grove for Libraries, our Aspen development partner, will begin rolling out this enhancement tonight. No disruption to the online catalog is expected, and patrons and libraries should not notice any changes. Update March 9th, 2026: We are delaying the rollout of the new Hoopla API, due to unexpected issues that arose during our rollout preparations. We will announce a new...

The Aspen 26.02 release is live. This release includes the following features and fixes. Custom home screen links in the app You can now add custom links to your app home screen. These links can go to an external link (such as your library website) or to a screen in the app (such as Titles on Hold). For more information on how to customize your app home screen, see the new documentation. Filters...

A new feature in the catalog to automatically apply filters based on a keyword search is now live. Terms for certain formats, languages, and audience will strip those terms from the keyword search and instead apply the correlating filter. For example, a search for "lego playstation" will search for "lego" and apply the various Playstation formats in the catalog. You can find more on keywords and...

The Aspen 26.01 release is live. This release includes the following features and fixes. Web catalog Better "clear filters" functionality This release includes usability improvements for removing applied filters and facets. Better sorting of non-fiction editions The catalog now more consistently sorts individual editions in non-fiction grouped works by date. Palace project indexing improvements...

SWAN will be closed on Friday, January 16, 2026, for the day as part of our annual holiday in-service day. We will monitor systems and the helpdesk for any reported issues. Other requests received will be processed and responded to on Monday, January 19th.

The 2025 NCOA processing of patron records is now complete. All updated addresses and geolocation data have been uploaded. The Last Activity Date field update function when editing address information has been turned back on and will take affect tomorrow. Thank you for your patience during the updates. Please view the National Change of Address (NCOA) documentation for recommended steps to take...

We have received the address change data from Unique and will be updating patron records starting today. The number of patron records sent for processing was 773,650. Of those, 24,352 were returned with address changes for a change rate of 3.2%. In preparation, today we have temporarily disabled the Symphony function to update Last Activity Date when a patron's address information is changed. Once...

Update 12/25/2025 6:57 Thank you for your patience as we completed the scheduled database maintenance. All daily maintenance reports have concluded and access to WorkFlows has been restored. We suspended all reports that were scheduled to run during the database maintenance to ensure it would complete within the allotted time. We are unsuspending your reports to allow them to run again. You can...

The Aspen 25.12 release is live. This release includes the following fixes and enhancements. API updates for Hoopla Midwest Tape and Aspen developers worked together to improve the APIs for Hoopla, paving the way for Hoopla Flex integration and more automated syncing of libraries' Hoopla settings. SWAN will work with our support vendor, Grove, to thoroughly test the new APIs and ensure they're...

Online Patron Registration forms are now available in Spanish and Polish! Prospective patrons can access these forms through the SWAN Support Site by navigating to the Get a Card page. You can also link patrons directly to the translated forms using the following URLs: Spanish - https://swanlibraries.net/es/get-a-card Polish - https://swanlibraries.net/pl/get-a-card The Patron Point verification...