An open source platform, which includes MySQL 5 for managing data relationships, was the only option for the National Library of Australia’s new search engine. This “was something that was pretty important to us, we didn’t want to go and build something in-house,” Trove manager, Rose Holley, said. “We wanted it to be shareable when we were finished.”
Besides MySQL, the project uses SQLR, Lucerne, optical character recognition software, Jetty, Nginx, Restlet, and FreeMarker. Also included in the design were solid state disks (4 Intel X-M25 160GB drives) in each machine to help improve performance to support the search engines more than 8000 IOPS.
Currently the National Library is building upon relationship with many bookshops and retailers to extend their indexing capabilities. Also on the plate is a desire to roll out forums within the search engine that will allow users to interact and provide additional content for links and items.