Blacklight (software)

Last updated
Blacklight
Initial releaseOctober 30, 2009;12 years ago (2009-10-30)
Stable release
7.19.0 [1] / 1 May 2021;14 months ago (1 May 2021)
Repository
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.

Contents

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

See also

Related Research Articles

CiteSeerX is a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers, primarily in the fields of computer and information science. CiteSeer is considered as a predecessor of academic search tools such as Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search. CiteSeer-like engines and archives usually only harvest documents from publicly available websites and do not crawl publisher websites. For this reason, authors whose documents are freely available are more likely to be represented in the index.

A discovery system is a bibliographic search system based on search engine technology. It is part of the concept of Library 2.0 and is intended to supplement or even replace the existing OPAC catalogs. These systems emerged in the late 2000s in response to user desire for a more convenient search option similar to that of internet search engine. The results from searching a discovery system may include books and other print materials from the library's catalog, electronic resources such as e-journals or videos, and items stored in other libraries.

Apache Lucene is a free and open-source search engine software library, originally written in Java by Doug Cutting. It is supported by the Apache Software Foundation and is released under the Apache Software License. Lucene is widely used as a standard foundation for non-research search applications.

Ruby on Rails Server-side open source web application framework

Ruby on Rails, or 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 pages. It encourages and facilitates the use of web standards such as JSON or XML for data transfer and HTML, CSS and JavaScript for user interfacing. In addition to MVC, Rails emphasizes the use of other well-known software engineering patterns and paradigms, including convention over configuration (CoC), don't repeat yourself (DRY), and the active record pattern.

Google Scholar Academic search service by Google

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents.

A web framework (WF) or web application framework (WAF) is a software framework that is designed to support the development of web applications including web services, web resources, and web APIs. Web frameworks provide a standard way to build and deploy web applications on the World Wide Web. Web frameworks aim to automate the overhead associated with common activities performed in web development. For example, many web frameworks provide libraries for database access, templating frameworks, and session management, and they often promote code reuse. Although they often target development of dynamic web sites, they are also applicable to static websites.

DSpace

DSpace is an open source repository software package typically used for creating open access repositories for scholarly and/or published digital content. While DSpace shares some feature overlap with content management systems and document management systems, the DSpace repository software serves a specific need as a digital archives system, focused on the long-term storage, access and preservation of digital content. The optional DSpace registry lists almost three thousand repositories all over the world.

Apache Solr Open-source enterprise-search platform

Solr 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 and rich document handling. Providing distributed search and index replication, Solr is designed for scalability and fault tolerance. Solr is widely used for enterprise search and analytics use cases and has an active development community and regular releases.

BASE (search engine) Academic search engine

BASE is a multi-disciplinary search engine to scholarly internet resources, created by Bielefeld University Library in Bielefeld, Germany. It is based on free and open-source software such as Apache Solr and VuFind. It harvests OAI metadata from institutional repositories and other academic digital libraries that implement the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), and then normalizes and indexes the data for searching. In addition to OAI metadata, the library indexes selected web sites and local data collections, all of which can be searched via a single search interface.

In software engineering, a resource-oriented architecture (ROA) is a style of software architecture and programming paradigm for supportive designing and developing software in the form of Internetworking of resources with "RESTful" interfaces. These resources are software components which can be reused for different purposes. ROA design principles and guidelines are used during the phases of software development and system integration.

Papers (software) Reference management software

Papers is a reference management software for Mac OS X and Windows, used to manage bibliographies and references when writing essays and articles. It is primarily used to organize references and maintain a library of PDF documents and also provides a uniform interface for document repository searches, metadata editing, full screen reading and a variety of ways to import and export documents.

Apache ZooKeeper

Apache ZooKeeper is an open-source server for highly reliable distributed coordination of cloud applications. It is a project of the Apache Software Foundation.

SimpleDL is digital collection management software that allows for the upload, description, management and access of digital collections and is UTF-8 compatible. SimpleDL is not limited by format and is capable of handling documents, PDFs, images, videos, audio files, and data only objects. In addition to simple digital files, it can connect content so multipage documents, scores, or books can be uploaded and organized into chapters, books or by page number. It can also combine any number of images into one display object. The software is mostly used by libraries, archives, museums, government agencies, universities, corporations, historical societies, and other organizations that wish to host a digital collection.

Elasticsearch Search engine

Elasticsearch is a search engine based on the Lucene library. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. Elasticsearch is developed in Java and is dual-licensed under the source-available Server Side Public License and the Elastic license, while other parts fall under the proprietary (source-available) Elastic License. Official clients are available in Java, .NET (C#), PHP, Python, Apache Groovy, Ruby and many other languages. According to the DB-Engines ranking, Elasticsearch is the most popular enterprise search engine.

Foswiki

Foswiki is an enterprise wiki, typically used to run a collaboration platform, knowledge base or document management system. Users can create wiki applications using the Topic Markup Language (TML), and developers can extend its functionality with plugins.

The following tables compare the major enterprise search software vendors in their classes.

Algolia is a proprietary search engine offering, usable through the Software as a Service (SaaS) model.

Samvera

Samvera, originally known as Hydra, is an open-source digital repository software product. Samvera main components are Fedora Commons, Solr, Blacklight, and HydraHead. Each Samvera implementation is called a "head".

StormCrawler is an open-source collection of resources for building low-latency, scalable web crawlers on Apache Storm. It is provided under Apache License and is written mostly in Java.

References

  1. "Release 7.19.0". 1 May 2021. Retrieved 10 May 2021.
  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. "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.