Chris Awre & Diane Leeson LLI Seminar 20 th November 2012
Blacklight Background What is Blacklight and what can it do? Func5onality Technology Blacklight and Hydra Blacklight and the catalogue Community Blacklight 20 November 2012 2
Background University of Virginia (UVa) wanted to create a becer interface for their library catalogue An interface developed for a specific digital content project was further developed to create Blacklight a more general discovery solu5on Blacklight was made open source in 2008 UVa s5mulated a community to support this Blacklight is now used as a library catalogue interface at a number of Universi5es Led by Stanford and Johns Hopkins Universi5es Blacklight 20 November 2012 3
What is Blacklight? Blacklight is a next genera5on discovery interface Akin to Encore, Primo, Aquabrowser, etc. It is free and open source It con5nues to be improved (version 4 about to be released) It is an interface built on a Solr index And offers all the func5onality that this offers It is designed for use with single or mixed collec5ons (e.g., library, archives, images, videos, etc.) It is designed to be customised to meet your local requirements It is a Ruby on Rails applica5on Blacklight 20 November 2012 4
Blacklight? Solr + UVa = Blacklight Blacklight 20 November 2012 5
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 Geospa5al search Mul5ple search indexes Blacklight 20 November 2012 6
What else can Blacklight do? Sta5c URLs for all search and record pages Allows bookmarking and tagging Personal search history RSS and Atom version of any search Results sor5ng Export to RefWorks/EndNote Export as a cita5on Support Unicode and non- Roman scripts Embedded Google APIs (e.g., Book Preview) Blacklight 20 November 2012 7
Four key capabili5es 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 modifica5ons Blacklight 20 November 2012 8
Website hcp://projectblacklight.org Blacklight 20 November 2012 9
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, mul5- purpose repository solu5on based on Fedora Hydra one body of content, many views (heads) to this Blacklight offers a way of exposing rich repository func5onality Blacklight 20 November 2012 10
Hydra A collabora5ve project between: University of Hull University of Virginia Stanford University Fedora Commons/DuraSpace MediaShelf LLC Unfunded (in itself) Ac5vity 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 5meframe - 2008-11 (but now extended indefinitely) Change Text the way you think Blacklight about Hull 20 November 7 October 2012 2009 11 2
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 produc5on prototype in 2011-12 To run in parallel with exis5ng interface and gauge user feedback Interface design took advantage of new Bootstrap look and feel Same design toolkit as used by TwiCer Allows for responsive design to meet different device displays Ideas and solu5on fed back to Blacklight community Launched October 2012 Parallel running to Easter when decision on future op5ons will be made
Blacklight and community Without its community, Blacklight would have been another nice idea The community has made it becer It is valuable to have people to discuss ideas with at other ins5tu5ons Different views allow becer solu5ons for everyone Two communi5es Developer Managers They need each other for success Blacklight 20 November 2012 13
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together (African proverb) Blacklight 20 November 2012 14
Linking Blacklight to the catalogue
Demo
Feedback and exemplars
Feedback Some of the feedback received I think that this should be SHOUT OUT to people, students, present and prospec5ve ones! Also accessing it from my laptop was really interes5ng. 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. Addi5onal func5onality also requested Bookings, requests, more links, revised item display Addi5onal development is taking place as resource permits Blacklight 20 November 2012 21
Exemplars See https://github.com/projectblacklight/blacklight/wiki/ Examples Key examples include: Columbia Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Stanford Wisconsin-Madison (a major influence for our own design) WGBH Open Vault Blacklight 20 November 2012 22
Thank you Chris Awre c.awre@hull.ac.uk Diane Leeson d.c.leeson@hull.ac.uk blacklight-development@groups.google.com