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.

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.

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.

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. 

Pinnacle is a great example of a single Polaris implementation whose individual libraries have done unique PowerPAC customizations.  If you tour their site and switch among the locations you’ll notice each library’s PowerPAC is very unique even though they share a single instance of Polaris.

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.

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

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.

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.