[SWANboard] FW: PLA exploration - Consideration of Polaris over SWAN ILS offering?

SWAN Board Members, In case you have not seen this, Polaris is emailing what appears to be all SWAN library staff registered for PLA. For instance, Jeannie Dilger said her reference librarian received the email below, but not Jeannie, due to her reference librarian being registered. See below Stacy's email. I will say at this stage I have about six forwarded emails. Aaron Skog SWAN Executive Director 125 Tower Drive Burr Ridge, IL 60527 Phone: 630.734.5122 Fax: 630.734.5056 aaron.skog@railslibraries.info<mailto:aaron.skog@railslibraries.info> http://support.swanlibraries.net From: Stacy Wittmann [mailto:WittmannS@EisenhowerPLD.org] Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2014 2:38 PM To: Aaron Skog; Jeannie Dilger; Melissa Gardner Subject: FW: PLA exploration - Consideration of Polaris over SWAN ILS offering? Hi All, I'm guessing this is what you were referring to after today's meeting. So yeah, I got one. Thanks, stacy Stacy Wittmann Library Director Eisenhower Public Library District Harwood Heights, IL 60706 708.867.2233 www.eisenhowerlibrary.org [cid:image001.gif@01CF3949.B9F598F0] From: Richardson, John [mailto:John.Richardson@PolarisLibrary.com] Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2014 9:22 AM Subject: PLA exploration - Consideration of Polaris over SWAN ILS offering? Greetings: We look forward to seeing you at PLA and discussing possibilities for your Library or a group of libraries to migrate to Polaris! If this is something of interest to you, please read on. If not, we thank you for your time and have a great conference. Polaris has had tremendous success in automating libraries in Illinois over the past decade and we admit to tremendous surprise that we were not a short-listed candidate for SWAN's ILS migration project. As of yet, we have not had any debriefing on why we were not short-listed. We do know that Symphony, Evergreen and Virtua products were short-listed and isn't it interesting to note that in 2013, libraries that had each of these products has signed a contract to migrate to Polaris in 2014? You may know that Polaris has migrated many IL libraries from existing consortia to be either stand-alone (such as Orland Park) or new smaller consortia (such as RiverShare or Pinnacle). If your Library is even remotely interested in what Polaris can offer over the current and/or planned consortia offering, we invite you to consider automating with Polaris. Why? - Polaris is rated the #1 in customer support among our peers - We have elegant ebook integration with Overdrive, Axis 360 and 3M Cloud Library Service (this alone is worth considering!) To see a short webinar on how this integration looks, go to: https://vimeo.com/user21892483/review/87819802/776c4ca754 - Our PAC, Mobile PAC and staff searching all return the exact same search results every time. And negates the need for an expensive discovery layer such as Enterprise Portal or Encore. - We have affordable Facebook integration - Polaris is launching our next generation staff user interface called LEAP at PLA which is 100% browser and tablet based. Freedom to the roaming circulation and community outreach folks! - Our "only" business is to serve libraries and fully 92% of our entire customer base are public libraries or public-focused consortia - We delight our customers! Just ask your contacts at Barrington Area, Wauconda Public, Orland Park, Pinnacle Library Cooperative or others If you want to see how Polaris compares with other ILS product and services, go to Marshall Breeding's ILS Perceptions Survey at: http://librarytechnology.org/perceptions2013.pl While Polaris may not be affordable for some of the very small SWAN libraries, we do have a cloud-based offering and you might be surprised at how affordable we can be. Either way, we encourage you to stop by and visit us at booth # 1123 - or contact me directly to schedule a private hotel conference room meeting. Our mission is to help librarians serve their communities and we want to improve your staff efficiencies and delight your patrons! Thank you for your consideration of the enclosed and please share this email with any colleagues you feel would be interested. Kind regards, John Richardson Director, Library Partnerships Polaris Library Systems John.richardson@polarislibrary.com<mailto:John.richardson@polarislibrary.com> T. 800-272-3414 x4543 C. 315-638-6221 Helping librarians serve their community.