Ya'aqov,

Thanks for the kudos. FCLA already has Ex Libris' Metalib integrated in Mango as a "Quick Articles" search. Several of the State University Libraries have opted to make this one of their discovery services. You can see how this looks and works in the FIU, UCF and UWF catalogs:

http://fiu.catalog.fcla.edu/fi.jsp?
http://ucf.catalog.fcla.edu/cf.jsp?
http://uwf.catalog.fcla.edu/wf.jsp?

We are also looking at different ways to bring the Primo Central mega-aggregate index into the mix as a faster (non-federated search) alternative.


Josh



On Oct 8, 2010, at 12:44 PM, Ya'aqov Ziso wrote:

> 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]
>> 
>