Tour Polaris on Your Own

Monroe County Public Library is one of the best examples of a library who uses the Polaris PowerPAC framework as their library website.  MCPL has made extensive and attractive UI customizations.

Baltimore County’s catalog represents a very high level of careful customization.  The layout has been modified to include a custom header and footer.  The navigation mechanism in the header offers the same effective “drop down” behavior they employ on the BCPL home page.

Finger Lakes Library System is a consortium of five county library systems in upstate New York. Its a classic example of independent libraries sharing a single instance of Polaris.

Denver Public Library has done one of the finest jobs of “skinning” their PowerPAC which we’ve seen.  Both their website and PowerPAC have the same very attractive visual styling. 

Mohawk Valley and Southern Adirondack Library Systems was one of the first Polaris sites to adopt the Syndetics Unbound product integration.

SCCCPL migrated to Polaris from a library system they created on their own called Listen2000.

Pinnacle is a great example of a single Polaris implementation whose individual libraries have done unique PowerPAC customizations.  If you tour their site and switch among the locations you’ll notice each library’s PowerPAC is very unique even though they share a single instance of Polaris.

While the member libraries maintain their individual websites, the consortium uses PowerPAC as their sole web presence.  Where there’s a need for a page of local content (e.g., a page with Book Recommendations) , Black Gold has added custom pages within the PowerPAC framework and linked them to a “Main Menu” in the side dashboard area.

Richland Library has accomplished some of the most sophisticated customization work we’ve seen.  Their website features a fully responsive web design and Richland has used the Polaris API to integrate a lot of searching and PAC functionality right into the home page.

Maricopa County not only uses PowerPAC as their library website, but they’ve populated the site with some great content.