April 24, 2025 1:30 PM–3:00 PM
Zoom
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
- Development updates
- Series pages
- List development opportunities
- Coming up: Aspen events module, community engagement module, holds from purchase suggestions
- Development priority setting
- Review DUX January 2025 priority activity
- Review Aspen Networking suggestions from the March 2025 meeting
- Discuss Aspen comments from the 2025 SWAN Platform survey
- Discuss accessibility, preparation for ADA Title II compliance
- Configuration changes for Aspen
- Bulk delete for browse categories
- OPAC Admin masquerade mode permissions
- Check-in post server migration
Notes
- The group discussed the updates to the series page and noted that the Syndetics Unbound integration was pointing all recommendation links (similar titles, authors, etc.) to the main consortium catalog at catalog.swanlibraries.net. This has since been fixed and all links are pointing to the individual library catalogs.
The chair also shared an opportunity to co-sponsor development around lists enhancements with the Helen Plum Library. These include more options to organize your "list of lists" within My Account through folders, tagging etc.; options to sort by author and call number; and improvements for printing lists. These enhancements did not rise to the top of the group's priorities. The chair also shared upcoming development for a community engagement module in the group, which would be similar in functionality to Beanstack. This functionality is not yet ready for testing, but we expect to see something to test later this year.
The group spent the majority of the meeting reviewing our current priorities, looking at the wishlist activity from the last Aspen Networking group and Aspen and LiDA related comments from the 2025 SWAN Platform Survey. The top development priorities were: - Investigate additional juvenile format filters (e.g. board book, picture book, etc.)
- View all formats in the format facet, without having to search
- Add a true drag-and-drop functionality for lists
- Improve speed and performance in LiDA
- Limit "While you Wait" suggestions to locally available titles (instead of titles in the full consortium)
The group also prioritized potential projects to complete this year, and they chose to analyze keyword searches to identify improvements to relevancy and search suggestions. Before the next meeting, the group will complete a focus group activity to collect information about keyword searches and results.
Additional activities discussed, which the group may or may not pursue later include: - Identifying improvements to checkout history, such as the ability to restore deleted titles within a certain timeframe
- Improving hold prompts for nonfiction titles in the catalog
- Testing and improving format labels (e.g. Audiobook CD)
Finally, the group discussed two configuration improvements. One was to allow OPAC Admins to masquerade as other staff roles, and another was to allow a bulk delete option of browse categories. Unfortunately, testing found some bugs with these configurations so we will need development work to be completed before we can enable them.
