Library Tools

Blacklight – next-generation catalog

Blacklight is a multi-institutional collaboration building a better discovery platform framework.

This is a Ruby on Rails “engine” that provides a basic discovery interface for searching an Apache Solr index, including fielded searching, applying and removing facet constraints, sorting and paginating through search results, and more. As an engine, Blacklight components are customizable via Rails (templating) mechanisms to meet the search and discovery needs of heterogeneous data, allowing different information displays for different types of objects.

This is free and open source software.

Key Features

  • Stable URLs for search and record pages allow users to bookmark, share, and save search queries for later access
  • A JSON API For searching and retrieving records
  • RSS and Atom feeds of search results
  • OpenURL/Z39.88 COinS support, allowing plugins like Zotero to easily extract data from the page.
  • OpenSearch and schema.org, a collection of simple formats for the sharing of search results.
  • Plugins include:
    • Blacklight MARC – library catalog enhancements for Blacklight.
    • Spotlight – enable librarians, curators, and others who are responsible for digital collections to create attractive, feature-rich websites that highlight these collections.
    • GeoBlacklight.

Website: projectblacklight.org
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia, The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University, Johns Hopkins Universities, and Data Curation Experts
License: Apache License v2.0

Blacklight is written in Ruby. Learn Ruby with our recommended free books and free tutorials.


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NewGenLibMetadata content management software
BlacklightNext-generation catalog
PMBLibrary automation system based on PHP and MySQL
OpenBiblioLibrary administration web interface

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