Tour Polaris on Your Own

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.

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. 

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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”).