Tour Polaris on Your Own

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

ALP has made great use of standard PowerPAC design elements to engage their patrons including custom dashboard web parts and content carousels.

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.

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.