Tour Polaris on Your Own

SCCCPL migrated to Polaris from a library system they created on their own called Listen2000.

Bartlesville has a very attractive PowerPAC where they’ve made great use of dashboards and carousels.  The site has been “skinned” to look very much like the library home page and there’s great cohesiveness between the two.

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

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.

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.

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. 

Brampton has done some very basic customizations and added quite a few nice dashboards in the left panel of their PowerPAC.  Interestingly, BL offers both Overdrive and Cloud Library ebooks.  The Overdrive interface uses the legacy non-integrated approach while the Cloud Library uses the full Polaris eBook 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.

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.

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.