Fac-Back-OPAC

The "Faceted Back-up OPAC" or Fac-Back-OPAC is an advanced catalog interface based on Lucene Solr, marc4j, and Django. Dan Scott (Laurentian University) archived the software on Google Code. There seems to be step-by-step install documentation as well.

Dan Scott mentioned how Solr dominated the code4lib 2007 conference, including all-day preconference led by Erik Hatcher and MyResource portal demo by Andrew Nagy. The Fac-Back-OPAC was derived from Casey Durfee's "Open Source Endeca in 250 Lines or Less".

1. MARC records (bibs and holdings) are extracted nightly from traditional OPAC.

2. then run through marc4j scripts (controled by Jython programming language) converting them to UTF-8 MARCXML.

3. then indexed through Solr (see tutorial) configured with bibliographic schema, run inside Jetty application server. Fields are extracted from MARCXML records as XML strings and sent to Solr instance via HTTP POST method.

4. The Django Web application framework then comes into play. It "implements the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern written in Python".