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fac-back-opac
Faceted online public access catalogue; use as an alternate interface or backup catalogue
  
  
  
  
    

Introduction

The faceted backup OPAC project began with Casey Durfee's Open Source Endeca in 250 lines or less presentation at the code4lib 2007 conference, where he claimed to provide faceted features similar to the Endeca and AquaBrowser experiences using Solr and Django.

Casey's work focused strictly on the Dewey-based Horizon system he works with at the Seattle Public Library. After downloading his code, I was able to tweak the code to work with our LC-based Unicorn system at the Laurentian University Library. I wanted to demonstrate a faceted search interface to my colleagues, and I also needed a backup catalogue because our production ILS has a nasty habit of dying at inconvenient times. It was a good opportunity to get a bit more hands-on experience with Django and Solr - so this turned out to be a perfect project for a couple of evenings.

Casey gave me his blessing to do whatever I wanted with the code, so I made it available under the Apache 2.0 license, started with Casey's original code in the project SVN repository, and began checking in changes. Mike Beccaria, who also attended Casey's presentation, quickly joined the project as he had been working on his own fork of Casey's code and has added several enhancements. He works at Paul Smith's College and currently uses Fac-Back-OPAC for their book catalog. You're welcome to join us too!

News

Examples

Changes

Casey's code was pretty good to start with, but we're trying to make it even better:

Details

At the moment, the code needs lots more work, but the following leaps out at me: