After many years of service to Sno-Isle Libraries, CARL will soon be retiring. And as much as I appreciate CARL's good work over the years, I'm very excited about his replacement. Now before you think I'm being callous about a loyal staff member's departure, I should explain that CARL is our Integrated Library System; it's our catalog, our patron database, it's what we use to make the library work for you.
CARL is retiring because the manufacturer will no longer support the system with future upgrades, so after an exhaustive process of questioning vendors and kicking a few tires, we'll be soon upgrading to the Polaris system. Polaris has a lot of great features that I'm pretty sure you'll really like. For instance, don't you hate it when you take a vacation and all your hold requests show up when you're gone --- and then get sent back before you return? Polaris has a feature that lets you put your holds in a 'sleep' mode, so you don't lose your place in line, and you don't miss any holds.
That's just one of the features in Polaris, and we're still learning about all the cool things it can do to make your library experience new, improved, easy and powerful. Polaris is more efficient than CARL (sorry, CARL!) so we are spending your tax dollars smartly to provide you with the optimum value into the 21st century.
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9 comments:
inteRgrated?? aaiiiieee
Oops! Corrected! (My fingers make up words all the time!)
Wow! Well, goodbye, Carl. But if the rest of the features that Polaris can offer are as beneficial as the hold one, then bring it on!
Is CARL an acronym for Colorado Association of Research Librarians? That's what I remember hearing at one time. If so, is it a group of people?
Though learning to navigate in a new system will be challenging, I'm looking forward to using the new functionalities in Polaris.
Thank you for the graciousness with which you acknowledged the rather picky comment about the typo.
we are anticipating some very fun retirement parties!
Does this mean we will not have access to things like Mango???
Mango is one of the databases we subscribe to, and it isn't really part of the ILS, so don't worry, all the databases you love will still be there!
Will you still have the "recently added items" section?
That's one of most popular features, so it'll definitely stick around.
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