blacklight intro - lli seminar
DESCRIPTION
A presentation given on the Blacklight discovery interface to University of Hull library staffTRANSCRIPT
Chris Awre & Diane Leeson
LLI Seminar
20th November 2012
Blacklight
• Background
• What is Blacklight and what can it do?– Functionality– Technology
• Blacklight and Hydra
• Blacklight and the catalogue
• Community
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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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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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Blacklight?
Solr + UVa = Blacklight
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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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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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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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Website – http://projectblacklight.org
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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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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)Text Blacklight | 20 November 2012 | 11
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
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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“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together” (African proverb)
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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 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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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
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