Tour Polaris on Your Own

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).

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.

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. 

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.

Barrington’s PowerPAC boasts a very simple and attractive elegance – a design consistent with their overall web presence. BPL is one of the best examples of a library which has branded its PowerPAC to match its over all web presence.

Bartlesville has a very attractive PowerPAC where they’ve made great use of dashboards and carousels.  The site has been “skinned” to look very much like the library home page and there’s great cohesiveness between the two.

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.

Orland Park is a good example of a single site library which has done a very nice job of creating a custom theme.  As part of their custom “skin” they’ve integrated a number of very effective custom format icons for their title search results.

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.

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.