Partnerships
New partnerships include Web Feet for preselected Internet resources and Syndetic Solutions for enhanced bibliographic data. GIS previously announced agreements with MSNBC for a continuous news feed for its Polaris PowerPAC portal, with Baker & Taylor and Ingram Library Services, Inc. for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), and with Unique Management Services for material recovery.

Web Feet selects and describes the best Web resources for public libraries and schools. With 5,000 Web sites chosen by librarians, teachers, and subject-area experts, Web Feet offers links to hundreds of topics. New content is added and existing content is updated monthly to ensure the collection and all URLs are kept current. Libraries that subscribe to the MARC-formatted Web Feet collection can import records into the Polaris database for use with the Polaris PowerPAC.

Syndetic Solutions provides libraries with enriched bibliographic information that allows them to display fiction and biography profiles, tables of contents, first chapters or excerpts, summaries and reviews, author biographies, and full-color cover images. By subscribing to descriptive information feeds from Syndetic Solutions, Polaris customers can display enhanced content for records in their own library catalog as well as for records retrieved from other Z39.50 library catalogs.

In announcing these alliances, GIS president Katherine Blauer said: "Our goal with our PAC-related third-party partnerships is to help our customers add value to their library catalogs by providing them with access to high-quality enhanced content. Our relationships with Web Feet, Syndetics, MSNBC, and others support our customers' initiatives to improve service to their library users."
 

Polaris Implementation
To help fund the purchase of Polaris, the Paulding County Carnegie Library received over $54,000 in Library Service and Technology Act (LSTA) federal funds distributed by the State Library of Ohio. "We are very excited about this new grant," said Susan Hill, library director. "Polaris is the next step our library has to take to progress into the future. Eventually we hope to build a coalition with other Polaris libraries throughout the state to make a vast number of resources available to our citizens."

The Paulding County Carnegie Library is upgrading to Polaris from Gaylord's GALAXY system. In describing the decision to migrate to Polaris, Hill said: "GIS has been serving our library for over a decade with the GALAXY system. We have been pleased and very satisfied with the service we've received. We are excited about the future of our library with the Polaris system and confident GIS will continue to meet our needs."

Located in northwest Ohio, the Paulding County Carnegie Library serves a rural population of 20,000 through the main library in Paulding and branch libraries in the villages of Antwerp, Oakwood, and Payne, Ohio. The library was established in 1916 with a grant from the Andrew Carnegie Foundation.

Source: Gaylord Information Systems, Syracuse, NY, 800/272-3414; http://www.gaylord.com/automation.