The Discovery Working Group is comprised of library staff across public and technical services. The group supports the SWAN discovery platform through participation in user research and testing; library staff training; and input on development priorities, configuration changes, and desired enhancements.
Agenda
- Recent and upcoming Aspen development
- Decision: Enabling the select editions option in the holds modal
- Decision: How many languages do we show in the language facet?
- Grouped works format display
- Usability testing update
- Decision: Next steps for the grouped work format display
- Follow up on search relevancy project
- DUX 2025 year-in-review and DUX 2026
- Requests from tickets
- "Hold could not be placed"
- Colors for masquerade mode
- Sign up for DUX 2026
Notes
The group discussed the last three months of Aspen features and fixes. We are very excited about the sorting for periodicals and the recycle bin feature has come in handy.
A new display to select editions in the hold modal looks promising, but needs a few display tweaks, including:
- Improvements to the display of statuses and the numbered editions (e.g. "1 of 23 editions")
- Improvements to how you select if you want Aspen to pick an edition, or to select a specific edition - the dropdown is awkward and a button might be more intuitive and obvious
- Display of the side scroll - could present some usability challenges, and only the editions should scroll
The group discussed striking a balance between making it easier to select a specific edition when you want one, but making it easy to ignore and go with the default, so as not to overwhelm patrons.
We can now display up to 100 languages when selecting "more" from the Languages filter - but there are over 250 languages present in our catalog. These are available by searching for the language, and the group discussed if we should display all 250. First we're going to make some language adjustments, to better indicate to users to search for languages not displayed, and see if we need to expand the default.
The group also reviewed usability testing results for the new horizontal format display. At this time, SWAN recommends to continue to use the existing vertical format display, and pursue additional enhancements to the format display that will better align it with the LiDA app.
Tara shared follow up from the search relevancy analysis activity DUX completed at the previous meeting. Title and author searches are now much better in the catalog following recent development work. In the next few months, we will also see development work that will tackle the challenges for keyword searches that include a format (e.g. "books about turtles").
Finally, the group reviewed the accomplishments from 2025 and discussed potential projects for 2026. Formats and the new format display were discussed as a focus going forward. This year the group:
- Completed the keyword search relevancy analysis project, resulting in improvements to title author searching and soon-to-be-released improvements to keyword searches with formats
- Gave input on the new horizontal grouped work display
- Prioritized development requests, resulting in:
- OPAC Administrator masquerade permissions
- Showing all formats in the format filter
- Limiting "while you wait" recommendations to locally owned titles
- Improved speed and performance in the catalog and the app