Tour Polaris on Your Own

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.

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. 

As a multi-site system, Bridges has done a very nice job of personalizing the PowerPAC for the individual member libraries.  If you visit their PowerPAC, be sure and switch between a few of the library locations.  Notice how nicely each library site has been customized.

Clinton-Macomb has created a very nice custom theme for their PowerPAC that matches their home page.  Additionally, they’ve done a few things we haven’t seen at other libraries.  In the PowerPAC header they’ve added prompts where patrons can enter their login information to sign on to their account.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.