Josh,

Kudos to FCLA's team. Seems that that savings between ENDECA (not  a native
bibliographic search engine) and Solr were most significant, probably in the
range of 6 digits per year.

Integration of SFX seems seamless. How is FCLA planning to integrate also
MetaLib or any other subject database cluster engine?

Ya'aqov




On Fri, Oct 8, 2010 at 11:01 AM, Joshua Greben <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 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
> [log in to unmask]
>