What is GeoBlacklight?

GeoBlacklight is an open-source Ruby on Rails software application for discovering geospatial content, including GIS datasets, web services, and digitized paper maps. Based on the popular open-source software project Blacklight, GeoBlacklight began in 2014 as a collaboration by MIT, Princeton, and Stanford aiming to build off of the successes of the Blacklight Solr-powered discovery interface and the multi-institutional OpenGeoportal federated metadata sharing communities. As of 2022, it is used by over 25 academic libraries and cultural heritage institutions to provide a search engine across a federated catalog of geospatial data. For examples of how GeoBlacklight is used by our community, view our gallery.

Interested in collaborating on GeoBlacklight?

We are actively looking for community input and development partners. View our page on how you can contribute to GeoBlacklight.

Key Features of GeoBlacklight

• Text and spatial search with ranking
• Facet by institution, year, publisher, data type, access, format
• Facet by place, subject
• Results list view with icons, snippets, and map view of bounding boxes
• Spatial search on map in result list
• Detail map view for WMS features with feature inspection
• IIIF scanned map viewer
• Download the original file (Shapefile, GeoTIFF, GeoJSON, Esri Geodatabase, GeoPackage, or other SQLite database)
• Download generated Shapefile/GeoTIFF/KML/GeoJSON
• Built-in sample Solr 8.3+ index
• Built on top of Blacklight platform
• Search history
• Bookmark layers
• Share link via email
• Sort by relevance, year, title
• Customizable skin and facets

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