Tour Polaris on Your Own

Maricopa County not only uses PowerPAC as their library website, but they’ve populated the site with some great content. 

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.

Baltimore County’s catalog represents a very high level of careful customization.  The layout has been modified to include a custom header and footer.  The navigation mechanism in the header offers the same effective “drop down” behavior they employ on the BCPL home page.

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”).

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

Mid-Columbia Libraries has done an extraordinary amount of customization to their PowerPAC.  In addition, MCL has used the Polaris API to provide extensive discovery features right on their Drupal home page.  This site is an excellent example of how far you can go with your customizations and/or custom API implementations.

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. 

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.

TRAC was one of the first Polaris consortia covering such a wide geographical area.  TRAC has always been a progressive site, particularly given the challenges of serving a multi-type, multi-system consortium spread across a large region.

The Johnston Catalog is extraordinary and perhaps the best example of library staff using the Polaris API’s and open architecture to build their own public interface.