Tour Polaris on Your Own

Guelph has implemented a very attractive and functional PowerPAC.  They’ve remained close to the Polaris classic look and feel, but fleshed out the catalog nicely.  They’ve implemented :  a banner image, dashboards, content carousels, Google Maps and a lot more.

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.

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.

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.

Our PowerPAC demo is the ONLY system in our list that is not a live, in-production site. We include it so you have a site where you can login as a patron.

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”).

Champaign is an example of a library who chooses to situate their dashboard sidebar on the right side of the main content versus the left side.  As a result, the cover art for search results are prominent as the left most bit of content for the user.

Before coming to Polaris, The City Library used Bibliocommons for their discovery layer.  When they moved to Polaris in the summer of 2013 the Library made the decision to use Polaris’s native online catalog.  The Library contracted with Polaris to customize their PowerPAC with the goal of creating a particularly cohesive user experience across their web platforms.

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

DPL has long been one of our favorite examples of a library who has created a consistent and attractive look and feel for both their website and PowerPAC.