Tour Polaris on Your Own

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.

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.

Our PowerPAC demo is the ONLY system in our list that is not a live, in-production site. We include it so you have a site where you can login as a patron.

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.

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.

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.

Coquitlam has done some very basic but attractive customizations:  they’ve applied a nice banner image and modified some aspects of the over all color scheme consist with the library home page.

Coquitlam is notable for the number of languages supported:  English, Korean, Arabic, Vietnamese, Chinese, Spanish and French.

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

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”).

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