Blacklight (software)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.
| Blacklight | |
|---|---|
| Initial release | October 30, 2009 |
| Stable release | 9.0.0[1]
/ 25 November 2025 |
| Written in | Ruby |
| Type | Library and information science software |
| License | Apache License |
| Website | projectblacklight |
| Repository | |
History
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]
Features
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.
Implementations
- 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]