Blacklight

Blacklight is a free and open source ruby-on-rails based discovery interface (a.k.a. “next-generation catalog”) especially optimized for heterogeneous collections. You can use it as a library catalog, as a front end for a digital repository, or as a single-search interface to aggregate digital content that would otherwise be siloed.

What are some of the features?

Blacklight uses solr, an enterprise-scale index for its search engine. Blacklight features faceted browsing, relevance based searching (with the ability to locally control the relevancy algorithms), bookmarkable items, permanent URLs for every item, user tagging of items.

Who uses it?

The University of Virginia Library and Stanford University Library are the primary development partners, but you can see a current list of installations on our Examples page.

How do I get started?

Try installing Blacklight and indexing the sample data — our goal is for you to be able to get a demo running very quickly. Read the FAQ, join the mailing list, and come talk to us on IRC. If you want to jump right in, installing the 2.4 release is as simple as following the instructions on the Installation Instructions.