Tour Polaris on Your Own

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.

Like many Polaris libraries, the Ames catalog features a few content carousels based on booklists compiled manually by library staff.  Ames has done something unique.  They’ve put a mechanism in place which creates a booklist automatically.  The list (and therefore the content carousel) updates dynamically as items are added to and removed from a specific shelf location (“staff picks”).

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. 

Both resource sharing and autonomy are very important to the member libraries of CCS. This balance of attributes is very evident when you visit the Polaris PowerPAC pages for each library. Member libraries do a certain level of customization on their own while CCS consortium staff are quick to provide consulting and administration services.

TRAC was one of the first Polaris consortia covering such a wide geographical area.  TRAC has always been a progressive site, particularly given the challenges of serving a multi-type, multi-system consortium spread across a large region.

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.

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.

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

Each member library at MLC has a very attractive, custom PowerPAC look and feel.   MLC uses the full suite of Chilifresh products:  review, bookjacket images as well as the Polaris Social integration of the Chilifresh Connections product.