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Erik and I drove down to Asheville this morning for the Code4Lib conference that is being hosted at the Renaissance Marriott hotel. We got in town around 9:15 and after checking in and dropping our luggage, we attended the pre-conference on Koha that Erik signed up for. I signed up for the blacklight pre-conference, which was scheduled for 1:30pm so I had a lot of time to killJ. I am sure Erik will enjoy talking about Koha so I am going to focus on blacklight.

Naomi Dushay, Jessie Keck, and Bess Sadler presented on blacklight. Blacklight is an open source UVa‘s faceted Next Generation Discovery tool based on solr. It is a plugin to the rails framework and offers features including faceted browsing, keyword searching, relevancy, and display of content types. The great thing about blacklight is that it has a highly configurable ruby on rails interface. In addition, blacklight can index and retrieve several kinds of xml documents including EAD, TEI, and GDMS.

I installed blacklight on an ubuntu platform on a virtual box running on my vista laptop. The installation was pretty straight forward except for some few configurations here and there. Blacklight can be used to serve the same purpose as Vufind (http://searchworks.stanford.edu/) but can also be used for searching and displaying digital objects like the Northwest Digital Archive. The coolest feature that blacklight offers is the ability to write your own application helper using existing helper methods included in the blacklight application. This allows back-end users to basically write pure text and see it converted into html suitable for a good display in a browser.