Tour Polaris on Your Own

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.

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.

Finger Lakes Library System is a consortium of five county library systems in upstate New York. Its a classic example of independent libraries sharing a single instance of Polaris.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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