SolrMarc: the Next Generation
This talk will describe the design and features of the new, totally re-written version of SolrMarc, an indexing tool for creating Solr add documents from MARC records. SolrMarc has been used by both Project Blacklight and VuFind to create the Solr index that they rely on for searching. The new version provides a more powerful and more configurable index specification language that is backwards-compatible with the previous version but adds significant new capabilities such as conditional qualifiers, specification modifiers, multiple translation maps and support for dynamically-compiled custom indexing methods. It can work with different versions of Solr without needing to be re-compiled, and is easier to install, configure and upgrade. Most importantly the new version greatly increases indexing speed by pre-compiling the indexing specification and using multi-threaded processing. Test runs on the entire University of Virginia database are over 17 times as fast as the previous version, indexing over 5 million records in about an hour. Finally, it has an interactive user interface making it easier to create and debug index specifications.
