With the growing popularity of Year-In-Review features such as Spotify Wrapped, Grove organized a volunteer community initiative to develop Aspen’s own Year-In-Review feature for libraries called 2024 Shelved! This year’s stats include a patron’s total number of checkouts, the money they saved by using the library, their top genres, top series, top author, and more.
Aspen respects the privacy of all library patrons. In order to see 2024 Shelved, patrons must have their reading history enabled. Patrons also always have the option to delete any titles from their reading history from Aspen or delete their reading history altogether. Libraries also must configure Shelved and can determine which patron types it displays for, what date it is released to patrons, and which of their choice of two themes should be used. In 2024, Shelved comes with the choice of a clean “modern” theme or a more classic “festive” theme and you can see examples from both themes in the slideshow below.
Cori Hundley, the Systems Librarian for the Wyoming State Library (WYLD), who brought the idea to the Aspen Community’s attention at the 2024 AspenCon, had this to say about 2024 Shelved:
"We're excited to see Grove bring our idea to life with Aspen's Year in Review! Watching our vision transform into an engaging feature that celebrates patrons' unique journeys through the library is incredibly rewarding. It’s a fun, innovative way to reflect on how libraries inspire and connect communities throughout the year."
Shelved wasn’t the only feature Grove developers released with 24.12. Grove also worked with WYLD to develop new ILL functionality designed for library consortia using Symphony that share an ILS, but are too geographically distant to share a courier. Desiree Saunders, the WYLD Program Manager, had this to say about working with Grove:
"WYLD recently partnered with Grove to explore an alternative solution for enhancing the patron experience with in-system lending for our ILL system within the consortium. It’s been exciting to see this project advance so quickly after outlining our needs. We're now in an active testing phase that shows great promise. As always, Mark’s responsiveness and insightful suggestions—often introducing improvements we hadn’t even considered—have been invaluable. We’re eager to continue refining this solution and assessing its potential to better serve our patrons."
Finally, Grove also added the ability for patrons to add any title from the library catalog to their reading history, so reading history is even closer to being a true record of everything a patron has read!
Thank you to WYLD and our other sponsoring libraries as well as the libraries, individuals, and organizations that contributed to the success of this release!
