Tour Polaris on Your Own

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Phoenix Catalog is elegant in its simplicity.  One very notable customization they’ve made:  When you perform a quick search at a specific branch, the search limit defaults to just material checked in at that location.

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.