A presentation given on the Blacklight discovery interface to University of Hull library staff

1. Chris Awre & Diane Leeson
LLI Seminar
20th November 2012

2. Blacklight
• Background
• What is Blacklight and what can it do?
– Functionality
– Technology
• Blacklight and Hydra
• Blacklight and the catalogue
• Community
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3. Background
• University of Virginia (UVa) wanted to create a better interface for
their library catalogue
• An interface developed for a specific digital content project was
further developed to create Blacklight
– a more general discovery solution
• Blacklight was made open source in 2008
– UVa stimulated a community to support this
• Blacklight is now used as a library catalogue interface at a number
of Universities
– Led by Stanford and Johns Hopkins Universities
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4. What is Blacklight?
• Blacklight is a ‘next generation’ discovery interface
– Akin to Encore, Primo, Aquabrowser, etc.
• It is free and open source
– It continues to be improved (version 4 about to be released)
• It is an interface built on a Solr index
– And offers all the functionality that this offers
• It is designed for use with single or mixed collections (e.g., library,
archives, images, videos, etc.)
– It is designed to be customised to meet your local requirements
• It is a Ruby on Rails application
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5. Blacklight?
Solr + UVa = Blacklight
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6. Blacklight is built on Apache Solr
• Solr offers
– Faceted browsing
– Plugin architecture
• This allows local changes
– Relevance based searching
• The algorithm can be adjusted locally
– Advanced full text search
– Geospatial search
– Multiple search indexes
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7. What else can Blacklight do?
• Static URLs for all search and record pages
– Allows bookmarking and tagging
• Personal search history
• RSS and Atom version of any search
• Results sorting
• Export to RefWorks/EndNote
• Export as a citation
• Support Unicode and non-Roman scripts
• Embedded Google APIs (e.g., Book Preview)
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8. Four key capabilities
• Support for any type of record or metadata
• Object-specific behaviours
– Books, images, videos, music, manuscripts, etc.
• Specific views for domain or discipline-specific materials
• Easy to add different views, and override the core system with
local modifications
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9. Website – http://projectblacklight.org
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10. Blacklight and repositories
• Remember - Blacklight can be used as an interface to any type of
record
– This can include records held within digital repositories
• Blacklight is used as the default interface for the Hydra project
– A flexible, multi-purpose repository solution
• based on Fedora
– Hydra – one body of content, many views (heads) to this
• Blacklight offers a way of exposing rich repository functionality
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11. Hydra
Change the way you think about Hull | 7 October 2009 | 2
• A collaborative project between:
– University of Hull
– University of Virginia
– Stanford University
– Fedora Commons/DuraSpace
– MediaShelf LLC
• Unfunded (in itself)
– Activity based on a common need
• We aim to work towards a reusable framework to permit
repositories to support the management of many different types
of content for many purposes
• Original timeframe - 2008-11 (but now extended indefinitely)
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12. Blacklight for the catalogue
• Blacklight was tested as part of a JISC project in 2010
– This demonstrated it could be used with Millennium
• Decision taken to develop production prototype in 2011-12
– To run in parallel with existing interface and gauge user feedback
• Interface design took advantage of new ‘Bootstrap’ look and feel
– Same design toolkit as used by Twitter
– Allows for responsive design to meet different device displays
– Ideas and solution fed back to Blacklight community
• Launched October 2012
– Parallel running to Easter when decision on future options will be
made

13. Blacklight and community
• Without its community, Blacklight would have been another nice
idea
– The community has made it better
• It is valuable to have people to discuss ideas with at other
institutions
– Different views allow better solutions for everyone
• Two communities
– Developer
– Managers
• They need each other for success
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14. “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you
want to go far, go together”
(African proverb)
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15. Linking Blacklight to the
catalogue

19. Demo

20. Feedback and exemplars

21. Feedback
• Some of the feedback received
– “I think that this should be SHOUT OUT to people, students, present
and prospective ones! Also accessing it from my laptop was really
interesting. I really liked it that we can go directly to subjects.”
– “The new interface, is a lot more user friendly, I find it easy to
navigate my always around to exactly what I want. It looks more
modern and simple.”
• Additional functionality also requested
– Bookings, requests, more links, revised item display
– Additional development is taking place as resource permits
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22. Exemplars
• See
https://github.com/projectblacklight/blacklight/wiki/Exam
ples
– Key examples include:
• Columbia
• Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
• Stanford
• Wisconsin-Madison (a major influence for our own design)
• WGBH Open Vault
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23. Thank you
Chris Awre – c.awre@hull.ac.uk
Diane Leeson – d.c.leeson@hull.ac.uk
blacklight-development@groups.google.com