Tour Polaris on Your Own

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.

Bartlesville has a very attractive PowerPAC where they’ve made great use of dashboards and carousels.  The site has been “skinned” to look very much like the library home page and there’s great cohesiveness between the two.

Coquitlam has done some very basic but attractive customizations:  they’ve applied a nice banner image and modified some aspects of the over all color scheme consist with the library home page.

Coquitlam is notable for the number of languages supported:  English, Korean, Arabic, Vietnamese, Chinese, Spanish and French.

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

Salt Lake County does a great job of leveraging third party products and partnerships.  Their PowerPAC includes full integrations with both Bibliotheca Cloud Library and Overdrive eBooks.  The County Library takes great advantage of the Polaris integrations available from ChiliFresh (including bookjacket cover art).

Pierce County Library System has made creative use of the Custom Content area on their initial welcome page.  There are selectable tiles for popular functions like reserving a computer and making a purchase request.

Barrington’s PowerPAC boasts a very simple and attractive elegance – a design consistent with their overall web presence. BPL is one of the best examples of a library which has branded its PowerPAC to match its over all web presence.

ALP has made great use of standard PowerPAC design elements to engage their patrons including custom dashboard web parts and content carousels.

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.

The Johnston Catalog is extraordinary and perhaps the best example of library staff using the Polaris API’s and open architecture to build their own public interface.