Tuesday 12 October 2010

News from out there in the Solr system


The following news will be of interest to jiscLMS colleagues working with Blacklight or VuFind or with Solr in other contexts.

October 8, 2010 – Message to Code4Lib list from Joshua Greben, Systems Librarian/Analyst, Florida Center for Library Automation (jgreben@ufl.edu)


Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA), supporting the 11 State Universities of Florida, has switched search engines from Endeca to Solr. We went live with the Solr version of our locally developed discovery application (which we call Mango) in August. The motivation to switch to Solr was driven primarily by cost cutting efforts, not only to save the ongoing maintenance fees but additional fees that would have been incurred with increasing size of our data base, currently 11 million records.

We used Blacklight as a jumping off point for our implementation of Solr, changing it quite a bit to work with our existing Mango discovery application, and Mango required some modification to adapt the calls to the Solr search engine. Mango is a Tomcat application that also uses various APIs and data service layers to bring in outside content such as Google Book covers, journal article metadata, and real time ILS (Ex Libris Aleph) item availability.

We work closely with public and technical service librarians at the eleven State University Libraries in Florida to develop new features and services in Mango that make it a useful and informative service for our users. The State University Union Catalog can be found here with links to the eleven University Library catalogs: http://union.catalog.fcla.edu/

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