Hello Code4Lib-ers,

I just wanted to make a general announcement about the development of the Florida University Library System's Discovery service.

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 elven 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/



Joshua Greben
Systems Librarian/Analyst
Florida Center for Library Automation
5830 NW 39th Ave, 
Gainesville, FL 32606
352-392-9020 ext 246
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