Aspen 23.12 Release

The Aspen 23.12 release is live, and this is our first release since going live on Aspen LiDA. From now on, our release updates will also include a section on updates for the app. Highlights for this release include:

Relevancy updates

This release includes some changes aimed at improving results for exact title searches. Some of the changes to relevancy include:

• Deprioritizing series matches and increasing relevancy when the first word matches the start of the search term.
• Capping the amount of the popularity boost for number of checkouts, holdings, and formats so that titles that have a very large number of copies (e.g. Pride and Prejudice) are not over boosted in relevancy.
• Reducing the popularity boost when not searching by keyword (using the Title, Start of Title, Author, etc. dropdowns).

If you see any issues with relevancy, please send a ticket to the SWAN ticketing system.

Aspen LiDA updates

• A new logo for the SWAN Libraries + app now appears in the app stores and on devices that have already downloaded the app.
• In efforts to reduce initial load time when logging in, translation data will now only load the user's preferred language, if set, or else English.
• On the Linked Accounts screen users can now disable or re-enable account linking.
• Managing linked accounts in the Aspen web catalog will also send an app notification, and managing linked accounts in the app will also display an alert in the Aspen web catalog.

Palace Project integration

Aspen developers have begun work integrating the Palace Project, a non-profit e-book platform. At this time, we do not know of any SWAN libraries using the Palace Project, but for any libraries interested in the project work is underway to integrate Palace Project titles into Aspen.