TechValidate Research on Innovative Interfaces

Horizon was difficult to use and learn. Polaris has been easier to train and that helps us provide better customer service. Leap solved many problems for us over the past few years (network/internet connectivity, limited space) — and we really like the web-based format.

The Polaris client has made tech services more intuitive and efficient. Record sets are a wonderful for system maintenance and clean-up. Shelf Location is a great new place to communicate info with patrons about collection information. Not always a particular location, but a great way to talk about special collections.

We’ve been with Polaris for more than 10 years and the ILS we used before was already a technology dinosaur at that time. Polaris improved almost every aspect of our library service and allowed the system to start things like floating collections that have significantly increased our cost-effectiveness and efficiency.

We use Leap at our schools during Kindergarten roundup, during pop-up events at our local food pantry, senior living centers, other school events, and summer reading program kickoff. We also use it in the library for work at our mobile desks on the library floor.

We have a book bike that travels through our community during local events providing library card sign up and check outs. We also own two community bookmobiles that travel our service area with LEAP integration. During the initial Pokemon Go frenzy we used external LEAP access for new library card users during our weekly events.

Polaris is like the Apple of the ILS world. It’s well designed, easier to manage, training others is easier, patrons quickly understand the PowerPAC, and staff can quickly pick up Leap. It’s powerful on the back end while remaining easy on the front side.

Much easier to do reporting against Polaris. Working in a hybrid personal/corporate library, we need lots of custom reporting to answer questions from both the family about the status of collections and the larger corporation about valuations of those collections. These tasks were almost impossible in Horizon.

With Polaris we are empowered to customize and control more of the look and feel with the online catalog. With Polaris SQL access, our reporting team can create custom reports that can be accessed via a web interface, or automatically emailed on a regular schedule.