Hosting 8000+ manuscript transcriptions for Hitorical & Linguistic Analysis

Hello everybody,

I may begin posting on this forum more often in the coming months so I thought that I'd introduce myself properly!
I'm using Omeka to display and provide faceted browsing for a collection of 8000+ old manuscript transcriptions with very interesting content. I'm trying to create a network of researchers and contributors around these resources, and so I have installed things like the ExhibitBuilder and MyOmeka plugin.
It's all going well so far, however I think that Advanced Search is being stretched to the limit and is currently extremely slow!!! I'll be thinking about trying to integrate Solr or something else to solve this problem. Any tips or advice most welcome!!

Thanks,
Deirdre