News

OCLC has announced a planned infrastructure upgrade that will affect all services on Saturday, December 20th starting at 3 PM CDT, through Sunday, December 21st, at 3 AM CDT. All OCLC services including Connexion, WorldShare, InterLibrary Loan, and WorldCat searching will be unavailable during this maintenance window. Read OCLC's announcement here: UPDATE: Planned Infrastructure Upgrades...

Single sign-on is now enabled on the SWAN website. You can log on using your L2 credentials, which will also sign you on to our ticketing portal. Logging on will also return you to the page you logged in from, instead of redirecting you to the home page. If you have any issues at all, please email or open a ticket with SWAN support.

Our support vendor will perform scheduled maintenance on our production Aspen server on Thursday night, November 27th, between 10PM and 1AM. There may be a brief period of catalog downtime, less than 10 minutes.

The re-indexing processes have finished without errors. Our system is currently catching up with today’s reports. Our standard, nightly maintenance reports will run on schedule this evening. Staff should be all set for tomorrow morning. Tonight's Database maintenance concluded just prior to 8PM Thursday. At this time, this morning's regularly scheduled reports are catching up. We'll be sending an...

The Aspen 25.11 release is live. This release includes the following fixes and enhancements. Automatically applied filters Aspen now has the ability to automatically apply filters for certain searches. For example, a search for "new dvds" could apply filters for publication date and a format of "DVD". This feature is not yet enabled on production. SWAN is carefully testing and will work with the...

The Weeklies 2026 list has been posted to the support site. SWAN staff regularly evaluate the titles that are part of our annual weeklies list. Due to changes to publication frequency and the number of libraries with subscriptions to these titles, many titles from 2025 are not on the 2026 list. The bibliographic records for the 2025 titles that are not on the 2026 weeklies list are now updated to...

Background With the closure of Baker & Taylor, the Boundless platform will be sunset by the end of 2025. To maintain access to the eRead Illinois collection, the eRead team selected Palace Project, managed by Lyrasis, to continue that partnership. What normally takes months to transition a collection and library subscriber base of this size now has to be done in several weeks. SWAN is working...

The Circulation Working Group Election is now open. Please have the Circulation Manager from your library vote, and remember only to vote once. Please select 5 candidates. Election Ballot

The Aspen 25.10 release is live. This release includes the following fixes and enhancements. Better sorting for periodicals Aspen now sorts periodical copies by location, shelf location, and date (based on the call number). Improvements to series pages There are several improvements to series pages. Records with no volume information will appear at the bottom of a series page. Only records scoped...

We have created a new subscription that will take the place of the List all Users Created with Patron Point Yesterday report currently being delivered daily. The new report is called List All Users Created Last Week and will be delivered Monday mornings on a weekly basis beginning Monday, October 27. The new report will list all user records created for your library, not just those created by...

Hoopla Digital, both the app and website, do not appear to be working due to the AWS outage earlier today. Below is a message sent by Midwest Tape and Hoopla Digital: Due to the ongoing Amazon Web Services issue that is currently affecting internet access across the globe, Hoopla Digital is experiencing technical issues. The team is monitoring the situation and working to get the platform fully...

The October 2025 (July- September, 2025) 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 RAILS datacenter will be changing internet service providers on the evening of Thursday, October 2nd. While expected downtime is brief, the service impact may persist through the following day on Friday, October 3rd. Out of an abundance of caution, we want to alert SWAN library staff that the following services would be impacted due to their reliance on the Library Learning (L2) platform...

The Aspen 25.09 release is live. This release includes the following enhancements, as well as many performance updates for the catalog and app. Recycle bin If you delete lists, placards, or images from Aspen, you will now have the option by default to move the item to a recycle bin or permanently delete. Library staff with Aspen Administration permissions can restore from the recycle bin, in Aspen...

**Updated: This is now live** We are excited to share an update about a new Aspen feature that helps limit search results in your library's instance of Aspen. While not standardized across SWAN, we identified many common item types where holds are limited to patrons of the owning library. Using this information, we created a filter that will exclude these items from appearing in your catalog if...

Update Monday, September 1, 2025 10:20 PM We have concluded the scheduled maintenance on our indexes; Workflows is once again available. SWAN will be performing scheduled maintenance on our indexes this Sunday, August 31st, after all libraries are closed. These reports do take several hours to run so there may be a delay in the start of the standard reports for Labor Day Monday, September 1st...

Our Online Patron Registration Tool, powered by Patron Point, is live! This tool allows patrons to apply online for a full-access library card. We have updated our documentation and have an orientation recording available: Documentation: Online Patron Registration Video Training: Online Patron Registration Around 8:00 each morning, we will send a report of patrons who received a card via Patron...

The enhancement of our bibliographic records by Backstage Library Works has completed. You may resume all cataloging activities. Thank you for your patience during this time.

The SWAN support site is moving! It will now be located at swanlibraries.net. Update 3:20PM, August 26: The site is now live on swanlibraries.net. When you log in via L2 Library Learning, you will be prompted to grant access for the new site. Update 9AM, August 26: We encountered some unanticipated complexities updating the domain to swanlibraries.net. You can continue to access support...

The Aspen 25.08 release is live. This release includes the following fixes and enhancements. Saved log in for the app We've had several reports of frequent log outs from the SWAN Libraries + app, which would occur especially on unstable networks. Several improvements were made to keep users logged in when on unstable networks or switching between wifi and cellular networks. When you are logged out...