Blacklight (software)

Blacklight is an open-source Ruby on Rails engine for creating search interfaces on top of Apache Solr 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.

The University of Virginia began developing Blacklight based on its Collex scholarly publishing software, which also used Ruby and Rails and Solr.^[2] The goals of the project included improving the user experience over contemporary OPAC systems, particularly with regard to relevance ranking, and showcasing historically underutilized library collections.^[3]

Blacklight includes support faceted browsing, relevance-based searching, bookmarking documents, permanent URLs for documents.^[4] It is relatively simple to customize Blacklight, typically by writing Ruby code that overrides default Blacklight code.^[5] There are several plugins available for Blacklight as well, including an extension for geospatial data,^[6] a digital exhibit creation tool,^[7] and various search and user interface features.

• Early adopters of Blacklight include libraries at University of Virginia, Stanford University, North Carolina State University, WGBH Open Vault, and University of Wisconsin–Madison.^[8]
• The National Radio Astronomy Observatory uses Blacklight to provide access to data about telescopes, papers, conference proceedings, and theses.^[9]
• The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists used Blacklight with Apache Tika to comb through the 11.5 million documents from Mossack Fonseca popularly known as the Panama Papers.^[10]

• VuFind