How Caledon Public Library Uses Browse and Discover to Reflect a Diverse, Fast-Growing Community

The Objective: A Homepage That Looks Like Caledon

Caledon Public Library serves a fast-growing, diverse community in the Greater Toronto Area. The team wanted a catalog homepage that reflected the community they serve.

The BiblioCommons Browse and Discover experience gave them just that: a homepage that keeps pace with changing interests, responds to patron data, and rewards a second look.

The Solution: Browse and Discover

Browse and Discover turns the BiblioCore catalog homepage into a space that showcases a library’s collection and reflects its community’s interests. Libraries can decide what patrons see first when they land in the catalog, how the collection is merchandised, and how often the page changes.

For Caledon Public Library, that has meant a homepage shaped around the library’s own priorities. “Browse and Discover gives us the ability to control our catalog homepage so we can refresh content frequently, respond to trends quickly, and make data-driven decisions regarding navigation,” says Debra Mann, Coordinator, Digital Literacy & Access at Caledon Public Library.

That control pays off in two ways. It helps patrons discover more of the collection, and it gives the library its own identity within a shared catalog. As a longtime BiblioCommons partner (using BiblioCore) and a member of the Ontario Library Consortium, Caledon Public Library has always shared its catalog with its consortium partners. Browse and Discover lets the team put Caledon Public Library's own collection front and center for its patrons.

A Priority Row for Seasonal Content

The population of Caledon, Ontario grew by more than 15 percent between 2016 and 2021, and was estimated at 90,201 in 2025. The 2021 Census also shows that residents come from a wide range of backgrounds, and the homepage needed to reflect the diverse, fast-growing community it served.

One way the team does this with Browse and Discover is with a dedicated List Card row called ‘Caledon Library Recognizes’. The row is a priority space for seasonal curation: lists the team rotates through the year to mark observances and holidays. It’s refreshed at the start of every month and rotated more often during busy stretches.

"It gives us a dedicated bit of real estate on our homepage for the content that connects the people of our community with each other in celebration or remembrance," Debra says.

The ‘Caledon Library Recognizes’ List Card row on the Caledon Public Library Browse and Discover homepage, showing seasonal lists observing National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Mennonite Heritage Week, and British Home Child Day.

Building It Efficiently

A homepage changing this often could be a heavy lift for a small team. For Caledon Public Library, it hasn't been. Staff built it with step-by-step guidance in the Partner Portal, and a core skill they already had: "If you know how to make a list in BiblioCommons, you already have the skills to make a Browse and Discover home page," says Debra.

That ease has kept the team experimenting. For example, Debra has recently built a category page for the library's video game collection, organized by platform.

Busy library teams don't need to feel daunted by the idea of constantly updating the homepage with fresh content. Browse and Discover has time-saving functionality built in, including:

• Up to 30 homepages saved and ready to go, so the library can swap in a new one for a season or a community event without building it on the spot.
• Catalog Title rows that keep pace with the collection. If staff can search for it, they can turn it into a row that updates itself.
• Navigation and Link rows that guide patrons to the parts of the collection they're looking for, and to the parts they didn't know to look for.

Caledon Public Library joined on as a Preview Partner for Browse and Discover, getting hands-on with the feature well before its general release. Teaming up with BiblioCommons in that role also proved rewarding on its own terms.

"It's really nice to have the opportunity to see something develop and to have the chance to give feedback along the way to make sure that it becomes a product that has real relevance," Debra says. "The support that we got from BiblioCommons was excellent throughout. Our ideas were valued and considered, and the whole process was quite comfortable."

The Results: Using Data to Facilitate Patron Discovery

From the start, the team tracked how patrons used the Browse and Discover homepage through the BiblioCommons Analytics Platform, which feeds custom dimensions into the library's own GA4 (Google Analytics 4) property.

"When we looked at our customers' navigation habits over time, it became clear to us that we would need to direct our focus above the fold, to the top of the page,” says Debra.

The List Hero and Navigation rows at the very top were doing the heavy lifting, guiding most of the browsing and discovery happening on the page.

The top of Caledon Public Library’s Browse and Discover homepage, where the List Hero and Navigation rows guide most patron browsing.

That insight reshaped how the team spends its time: they doubled down on those top rows, putting their sharpest curation and freshest picks where patrons were already looking.

Further down the page, they leaned on the row types that look after themselves: Link rows to guide patrons through the collection, and Catalog Title rows that populate as new titles arrive. "It was a significant timesaver to set up those rows once and let the content automatically update with each new delivery of material,” says Debra.

What’s Next: Discovery That Surprises and Delights

With tracking in place from day one, Caledon Public Library is well positioned to measure what Browse and Discover means for circulation and holds.

In the meantime, Debra sees the difference every day. Caledon Public Library can respond quickly when something is happening in the community with fresh, visually engaging content ready to go at the top of the page. And they can keep testing where a collection or a button belongs, based on how patrons actually search and browse.

For Debra, that flexibility serves a lasting idea of what a library is for.

Learn more about Browse and Discover by watching our webinar, The Evolution of Discovery: Curate Your Patron Experience and Increase Engagement with Browse and Discover.

Learn how to build your own Browse and Discover homepage in our blog post: The Anatomy of a Library Catalog Homepage That Keeps Patrons Browsing.