Blacklight (software)

Blacklight
Initial release	October 30, 2009;16 years ago (2009-10-30)
Stable release	9.0.0 [1] / 25 November 2025;31 days ago (25 November 2025)
Repository	github.com/projectblacklight/blacklight
Written in	Ruby
Type	Library and information science software
License	Apache License
Website	projectblacklight.org

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.

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]

See also

• VuFind

References

1. "Release 9.0.0". 25 November 2025. Retrieved 27 November 2025.
2. Cohen, Laura B. (2007). "Adapting an Open-Source Scholarly Web 2.0 System for Findability in Library Collections or: Frankly, Vendors, We Don't Give a Damn". Library 2.0 initiatives in academic libraries. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries. pp.  58–72. ISBN   9780838984529.
3. Eden, Brad; Sadler, Bess (6 March 2009). "Project Blacklight: a next generation library catalog at a first generation university". Library Hi Tech. 27 (1): 57–67. doi:10.1108/07378830910942919.
4. Kang, Hyeran (23 September 2011). "A new interface for IUCAT: Blacklight". reDUX: a blog by the Discovery & User Experience dept. Retrieved 19 July 2016.
5. "Configuring and Customizing Blacklight". GitHub. Retrieved 19 July 2016.
6. "GeoBlacklight" . Retrieved 19 July 2016.
7. "Spotlight". Project Blacklight. Retrieved 19 July 2016.
8. Cartolano, Robert T. (4 November 2015). "History of Blacklight". doi:10.7916/D8J38S9M.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
9. DuPlain, Ron; Balser, Dana S.; Radziwill, Nicole M. (19 July 2010). Build great web search applications quickly with Solr and Blacklight. Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy. doi:10.1117/12.857899.
10. Hackett, Robert (11 April 2016). "The Panama Papers Search Tool Began as an Academic Skunkworks Project". Fortune. Retrieved 19 July 2016.