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. 

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.

Richland Library has accomplished some of the most sophisticated customization work we’ve seen.  Their website features a fully responsive web design and Richland has used the Polaris API to integrate a lot of searching and PAC functionality right into the home page.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

DPL has long been one of our favorite examples of a library who has created a consistent and attractive look and feel for both their website and PowerPAC.