Blacklight is an open-source

Ruby on Rails Ruby on Rails (simplified as Rails) is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and web ...

engine for creating search interfaces on top of

Apache Solr Solr (pronounced "solar") is an open-source enterprise-search platform, written in Java. Its major features include full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, NoSQL features ...

indices. The software is used by libraries to create discovery layers or institutional repositories; by museums and archives to highlight digital collections; and by other information retrieval projects.

History

The

University of Virginia The University of Virginia (UVA) is a public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia. Founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, the university is ranked among the top academic institutions in the United States, with College admission ...

began developing Blacklight based on its Collex scholarly publishing software, which also used Ruby and Rails and Solr. The goals of the project included improving the user experience over contemporary

OPAC The online public access catalog (OPAC), now frequently synonymous with ''library catalog'', is an online database of materials held by a library or group of libraries. Online catalogs have largely replaced the analog card catalogs previously u ...

systems, particularly with regard to relevance ranking, and showcasing historically underutilized library collections.

Features

Blacklight includes support faceted browsing, relevance-based searching, bookmarking documents, permanent URLs for documents. It is relatively simple to customize Blacklight, typically by writing Ruby code that overrides default Blacklight code. There are several plugins available for Blacklight as well, including an extension for geospatial data, a digital exhibit creation tool, and various search and user interface features.

Implementations

* Early adopters of Blacklight include libraries at

, Stanford University,

North Carolina State University North Carolina State University (NC State) is a public land-grant research university in Raleigh, North Carolina. Founded in 1887 and part of the University of North Carolina system, it is the largest university in the Carolinas. The universi ...

, WGBH Open Vault, and

University of Wisconsin–Madison A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase ''universitas magistrorum et scholarium'', which ...

. * The

National Radio Astronomy Observatory The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is a federally funded research and development center of the United States National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. for the purpose of radio ...

uses Blacklight to provide access to data about telescopes, papers, conference proceedings, and theses. * The

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Inc. (ICIJ), is an independent global network of 280 investigative journalists and over 140 media organizations spanning more than 100 countries. It is based in Washington, D.C. with ...

used Blacklight with

Apache Tika Apache Tika is a content detection and analysis framework, written in Java, stewarded at the Apache Software Foundation. It detects and extracts metadata and text from over a thousand different file types, and as well as providing a Java libr ...

to comb through the 11.5 million documents from

Mossack Fonseca Mossack Fonseca & Co. () was a Panamanian law firm and corporate service provider.Panama Papers The Panama Papers ( es, Papeles de Panamá) are 11.5 million leaked documents (or 2.6 terabytes of data) that were published beginning on April 3, 2016. The papers detail financial and attorney–client information for more than 214,488 ...

References

{{reflist Free library and information science software Free software programmed in Ruby Free institutional repository software

History

Features

Implementations

See also

References