Blacklight: Leveraging Next Generation Discovery

Abstract

Blacklight is an open source, next generation discovery application. Originally developed to serve as an overarching "discovery layer" for libraries, its design and engineering give it the necessary feature set and flexibility to also serve as a repository interface, capable of fronting content of any kind, local or remote. With a rich set of search, browse and view functions, Blacklight's look, features and behaviors can be readily configured to meet local needs "out of the box". As an application with a modular architecture, it provides a framework capable of supporting additional libraries and widgets that extend Blacklight's capabilities beyond resource discovery. And as a vibrant open source project integrating enhancements and development from more than a dozen institutions, Blacklight is becoming a proven platform for content discovery and access, agnostic of underlying systems or repositories. This presentation will demonstrate the broad-based utility of Blacklight, including its key features, its use in different contexts, and how it integrates with different repositories to provide a rich and ready-made discovery application.