Tour Polaris on Your Own

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

As a hosted customer they’ve taken a very unique approach: Lee College’s Polaris system (and therefore PowerPAC) is hosted in the cloud by Innovative, but Lee staff have located their customization files (stylesheets, etc.) on a local server – giving them freedom to change aesthetic elements quickly and easily on their own.

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.

Brampton has done some very basic customizations and added quite a few nice dashboards in the left panel of their PowerPAC.  Interestingly, BL offers both Overdrive and Cloud Library ebooks.  The Overdrive interface uses the legacy non-integrated approach while the Cloud Library uses the full Polaris eBook integration.

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.

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.

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. 

The MDPLS PowerPAC features a custom header and footer consistent with the overall library web presence.  The menu navigation in PowerPAC includes a very clever interactive search prompt built right into the header so the option to start a different search is always available to the user.

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.