Unless you are using VuFind exclusively as a wrapper around a third-party discovery service, you will need to index data into the system so that your users have something they can search. This page contains information on loading data into VuFind's Solr index.
Metadata is most commonly loaded in one of these formats:
Click on the metadata format above for details on how to ingest records of that type. Note that VuFind's MARC importer includes support for the MARCXML encoding, so you do NOT have to use XML-specific tools to load XML-formatted MARC records. If you are interested in supporting something new, see Supporting a New Metadata Format.
If you need data to load into your system, you might try loading it with VuFind's OAI-PMH Harvest Tool. If you need to retrieve it from your ILS, check for MARC Export Notes for your platform.
The Open Data Sources page lists potential sources for additional records to add to your index.
These pages offer step-by-step notes on loading records from specific systems.