Blacklight (Software)

Blacklight is an open source Ruby on Rails Engine for creating search interfaces on top of Apache Solr indices. The software is frequently used by libraries to create discovery layers or institutional repositories; museums and archives to highlight digital collections; and by other information retrieval projects.

The University of Virginia began developing Blacklight based on its Collex scholarly publishing software, which also used Ruby and Rails and Solr. The goals of the project included improved user experience over contemporary OPAC systems, particularly with regard to relevance ranking, and showcasing historically underutilized library collections.

Blacklight includes support faceted browsing, relevance based searching, bookmarking documents, permanent URLs for documents. It is relatively simple to customize Blacklight, typically by writing Ruby code that overrides default Blacklight code. There are several plugins available for Blacklight as well, including an extension for geospatial data, a digital exhibit creation tool, and various search and user interface features.