Zebra

Every so often I have heard mention of the Zebra XML indexing tool. I'd peeked at it once some time ago -- while cool, it wasn't right for what I was working with at the time.

Now I'm looking at solutions for how we're going to make our Fedora-based Digital Collections Repository available as a target for our Serials Solutions 360 Search. The first idea was to take advantage of our OAI data provider because it already exists and exposes our objects. SS wasn't ready to set up an OAI target.

The most sensible thing is to set up a SRU gateway. My only qualm about setting a gateway up on top of our Repo indexing environment right now is that we're making the transition from XPAT to Lucence/Solr, but we aren't there yet and I don't want to set it up for one and then have to set it up again when we migrate. It could be so easy that I don't need to worry, but I need to take it into consideration.

Then, I wondered if I could still take advantage of our OAI data provider and set up a SRU gateway on top of that? I asked on the OAI list and got a few responses, one of which I am researching.

Then someone emailed me about Zebra, because 2.0 has templates in place to handle OAI as input and provide a SRU gateway using Yaz. I haven't spent a lot of time on it yet, but it looks really interesting. I don't know yet if it's the solution for me, but as an XML indexing tool, Zebra 2.0 seems a real step ahead of its earlier versions.