News

The 21.15 release of Aspen will go live in production overnight on December 7th. This release includes several priority requests from SWAN as well as changes to browse categories. To-Dos If you have customized your browse categories and use sub-categories, you may need to update your parent categories. If you use the default SWAN created categories, you do not need to do anything. Browse category...

Do you have archives that you would like to digitize? Do any historical societies in your area have archives to digitize? Are you interested in starting any community driven archives programs? Do you already have digital archives that you would like to make more widely available through Aspen, the Illinois Digital Heritage Hub, and the Digital Public Library of America? If you answered yes to any...

Your Aspen Administration logins are now available! Directors Directors should make sure you can access these through the accounts and logins for your library. SWAN will cover the different logins and what they do in the Aspen Cohort 2 Kickoff meeting on January 10th. Be sure at least one person from your library is registered for that meeting. If you want to distribute the administration logins...

We are ready to submit patron records for National Change of Address (NCOA) processing in December 2021. Any remaining records from NCOA 2018 that have not been updated (NCOA 2018 note removed) will be excluded from the NCOA 2021 processing. Throughout SWAN, we have approximately 2,500 patron records remaining. Review the following report which is paged by library to see a list of these patrons...

SirsiDynix and Overdrive have made changes to the checkout process in Enterprise and BLUEcloud Mobile for Overdrive downloads. Patrons are now redirected to an Overdrive screen to complete the checkout. Aspen is not affected. We're aware of issues with the checkout process that include: "Open Content" popups do not consistently work. Clicking "Download" too many times from My Account will result...

If your library participated in Cohort 1 of the Aspen rollout, we'd like to hear how it went for you. Fill out the survey by December 7th. Your feedback will help SWAN staff prepare and improve the rollout for Cohort 2. Thank you in advance for your insights, they will help make the process even smoother for your colleagues. Fill out the survey

SirsiDynix will be performing planned maintenance of the Enterprise catalog server on Wednesday, November 10th 2021 at 11:15 p.m., which will require downtime throughout the process. The maintenance is expected to take no longer than an hour, so the impact will be minimal. Unless complications arise, no further communication will be issued for this outage.

Last Cataloging Corner of 2021! Here are just a few reminders on local practices, and what’s coming, so we start the new year with a clean catalog: Consumer Reports Buying Guide & Crain’s Book of Lists These two titles get their own monographic records every year; they do not get attached to the serials records. We noticed that some libraries had attached the Buying Guide to the Consumer Reports...

As a part of SWAN's ongoing security initiative, we're pushing new, more secure passwords for the library-generic BLUEcloud Analytics accounts. Beginning next Wednesday, November 10th, you'll need to login to your library-generic BLUEcloud Analytics account using the new password provided by SWAN. Your current default password for BLUEcloud will no longer function. These new passwords are...

We are happy to announce that for 2022, the Acquisitions Users group and Cataloging Users group will become one group that meets 4 times a year: Feb 10th, May 12th, Sep 8th, and Dec 8th. This decision was based on different factors, such as topics that crossover both modules, fewer meetings for you to attend, and an opportunity to learn more about one area or the other. With this being said, we...

SirsiDynix will be performing planned maintenance of the eResource Central server on Tuesday, October 26th at 11:00 p.m., which will require downtime of eRC services throughout the process. The maintenance is expected to take no longer than an hour. During that time, the resources listed below will be unavailable via Enterprise and the SWAN BLUEcloud Mobile app. This issue does not affect the...

The October 2021 (July-September) 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 sheet 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 Director and...

Kanopy billed libraries incorrectly for the first month of the SWAN discount. The 5% discount wasn't applied for September. Kanopy states: "They are working through a technical issue and libraries will be notified directly from our customer support team by the end of the month, hopefully in the next week or two, about either credits or revised invoices." If you have questions about your bill...

The Aspen Discovery 21.13 release goes live on Tuesday, October 12th. This is a smaller release that includes bug fixes and improvements to indexing speeds. Notable enhancements include: Improvements to how copies and holds counts are displayed for Overdrive titles Ability to add alt text for placard images Updates for handling unknown and missing languages and audiences while indexing grouped...

Unfortunately, fines payment will not be available in the Aspen catalog for the Cohort 1 libraries' go-live dates. Though the ProPay integration development for Aspen is complete, unexpected delays from ProPay are preventing implementation. SWAN is working hard to investigate every option to make fines payment available as soon as possible, including alternate online e-commerce solutions. At this...

Get ready! The first cohort of libraries will go live on Aspen starting October 18th. Here is what you can expect on your go-live day. SWAN tasks SWAN will complete the following tasks on your go-live day: Remove the "beta catalog" badge in Aspen Add list copying functions to Enterprise, so patrons can copy lists from Enterprise to Aspen Update your Enterprise catalog with a banner linking to...

The last Cataloging Users meeting of the year will be held on Thursday, Oct 7, 9:30-11 a.m. Please see the agenda and how to access the meeting: Cataloging Users. We hope you will be there!

RAILS is holding town halls in October and November. Each town hall is two hours long, and they are scheduled at different times to fit a variety of schedules. You can find a list of town halls and registration information on the RAILS home page at https://www.railslibraries.info/news/252552

----------- Update on 10/6/2021 at 08:45------------ We've come across the following Known Issues. Please see those posts below for details: Transit Label Generator Producing Incomplete Labels - Resolved Error Changing Status when Approving BLUEcloud Acquisitions Orders ----------- Update on 10/6/2021 at 06:00------------ The Web Services upgrade has concluded successfully and required less than...

The Aspen Discovery 21.12 release is live. The highlights of this release include: Staff with masquerade mode permissions can masquerade as any patron, whether or not the patron has logged into Aspen before Fixes to diacritics displaying in grouped records Ability to display placards based on language - for example, you could create two placards, one in English and one in Spanish and display them...