Polaris ILS Reviews

My favorite feature about Polaris is that it lets you search by various identifiers. For example, you can search a book by author, barcode, or title. You can also search people by both their first and last names.

I wish it contained a spell check or some way to catch phrases that are similiar. For example, if I was looking for a book called "I Am a Champion" but it's actually called "I Am a Winner" I wish that it would come up in the search terms. Sometimes I don't know the exact title of the book I'm looking for, and this makes it difficult.

Please consider putting a spell check or exproximate phrase in your search bars. Something like google uses.

Polaris makes it easy to notify patrons of overdue books and to put books on hold for patrons.

Polaris is the ILS I have the most experience with and can say that the search options are varied and powerful, but not always intuitive. The functionality from a cataloger prospective and from front line workers are great. The reports feature does a wonderful job of keeping my organized and able to make batch changes.

It's sometimes just not functional. It can not always make sense. Some of the things that it likes is odd. Additionally, it needs integration with realia reservations.

It helps keep our collection organized, available to the public, and allows us to plan for future collection development.

Polaris was simple to learn when I was just starting in the Circulation Department at the library. It's interface is fairly user-friendly while still having a lot of functions.

When you make a mistake in Polaris, correcting it can sometimes be difficult. Often that is not a big deal, but sometimes you can make a mistake in a patron's account and cause problems.

Also, there is are a few parts of Polaris that we do not use, so maybe an option to hide certain fields so as not to mistakenly fill them, or hide buttons so as not to mistakenly press them - we know what they do, but do not want to use their features.

All Circulation procedures are easier with Polaris ILS. I cannot imagine checking patrons in and out without it. It makes the process quick, easy, and personable. We can keep track of patron accounts more easily than ever. We are able to find books, DVDs, or other materials that are in our system in just seconds, saving us so much time.

Quick key functions to pull up most used features and ability to quickly switch through them.

Polaris would at times crash or boot me out of the system without logging me off. It would also allow my user credentials to be enter into 2 separate terminals that led to some discrepancies on my end of night count out. The 3 step log out was a little bogged down.

Polaris is set up to be very user friendly allowing for even new employees to offer quick and effiecent customer service.

I liked how specific you could be with your search. You can limit by branch, collection, whether the item is in the library or not. When you do a keyword search you can limit it a lot, by all results featuring this word or omitting a certain word. Very helpful in that way. When results show up it is very clear whether the item is available and where it is located.

Having all these search options meant that there was too many ways to do one thing. You could try to do the same thing five different ways and come up with different search results each time. Some ways were inefficient as well. Also if you leave an "s" off of a word for example, searching for books about airplanes vs. airplane will yield very different results. I disliked the public side of the catalog. I found it hard to use and customers often would be unable to find what they were looking for.

It is a good product, not the best ILS, but better than others. Very good for specific searches. Not that great for patrons. Searches on the patron side yield unrelated items even if you are very specific on what you limit your search by.

Working with public to help them locate catalog items, patron records- fines etc.

Polaris is very easy to use for registrations.

Polaris can be complicated when switching between librarian and circulation modes.

Polaris is has helped us with registering patrons and new material types.

The item check-in system is very easy to use.

The Polaris system would have a myriad of crashes.

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Polaris has made it very simple to keep track of every patron's account information.

It's widely used in the public library setting and they have offices located nearby. It's always been easy to get in touch with someone locally for assistance with the ILS.

I dislike the number of upgrades it requires.

The Polaris ILS helps with almost all system administrative tasks, as well as circulation. It offers benefits such as clear reports for determining collection development.

I love how easy it is to jump into or teach new hires how to use it

I wish there was another level of personaliztion that could be tailored to each branches needs.

If you need a way to centralize library info into one system this is for you

Allows libraries to centralize patron info

Easy to put multiple holds on.

Easy to utilize the patron record information.

How particular the search terms need to be

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