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Winter 2026 Sprint Recap – GeoBlacklight v5.2

Summary

Building on the momentum of last year’s GeoBlacklight v5 release, community members from across the continent came together between January 26-30, 2026, for a week-long virtual sprint dedicated to GeoBlacklight development. Work included updating the GeoBlacklight v5.x codebase, preparing for v6, bringing the documentation up-to-date, and starting discussions around the next generation of OGM metadata. We held daily standups so contributors could share what projects they were working on asynchronously throughout the week.

🗓 GeoBlacklight v6 development

Work got underway to update the GeoBlacklight codebase to support Blacklight v9, which was released in Fall 2025 (shoutout to Justin Coyne!). This change will improve performance, allowing us to convert SCSS to CSS and improve asset generation. Other updates include:

🥳 GeoBlacklight v5.2.0 release

Several of the v6 improvements were backported to v5.x, including updating ArcGIS Online links to prepare for the deprecation of Map Viewer Classic and fixing the OGM Aardvark validation file. Critical updates were also made to fix the CI build, including patching the version of vite_ruby used so that Vite builds can still be tested (shoutout to Christina Cortland!) and temporarily removing failing docker builds. A few other bugs were fixed, too!

For a full changelog, view the v5.2.0 release on GitHub.

✏ GeoBlacklight documentation

Versioning is now available in the GeoBlacklight documentation, thanks to the implementation of mike! The URL https://geoblacklight.org/latest/ will always point to the latest version, but users can toggle between different versions of the documentation that are tailored to their specific software version. A future goal will be to update the content of the different versions. The Release Calendar was also updated for v5 and the future v6 release.

🦡 OpenGeoMetadata Badger (?!)

Discussions began around the next generation of the OGM metadata schema. The group jokingly referred to this potential evolution as “OGM Badger” in homage to the current standard, OGM Aardvark. Proposals included:

  • Reworking the dct_references_s field to allow for multiple references of the same type with optional associated labels, and to convert escaped JSON to a human-readable format.
  • Rethinking the relationship fields and how best to represent items like index maps and collections.
  • Removing field suffixes (like _s and _sm) that may not be relevant beyond GeoBlacklight or may cause problems with indexing (as with dct_references_s).
  • Potentially adopting a JSON-LD vocabulary to associate various fields with their relevant vocabularies/ontologies (similar to existing prefixes like dcat_ and dct_).

Reflections

With the launch of the Geo4Lib community last year, the informal structure that had been supporting GeoBlacklight development – monthly meetings, email listserv, Slack team, and twice-yearly coding sprints – expanded to encompass the related projects that core members have always been working on, including Geo4LibCamp, OpenGeoMetadata, OpenGeoMetatadata Viewer, and OpenIndexMaps. Geo4Lib held its first “Geo4Lib Community Sprint” in Summer 2025, featuring work in all these different arenas (read the sprint write-up here!).

Development on GeoBlacklight has continued through this evolution, but the community also recognized a need for dedicated time to come together and focus specifically on open issues in the GeoBlacklight code repository. Hence the decision to dedicate the winter sprint specifically to GeoBlacklight.

We’ve been experimenting with the one-week format for a few sprints now, and once again it seemed like a good amount of time to foster discussion and engagement from new participants, as well as to check off quite a few goals on our communal to-do list. With the release of v5.2, active development of v6, and improvements to the documentation, GeoBlacklight is on a steady path forward!

Shoutout to the dozen participants who took part in the sprint, including the developer teams from Stanford and Cornell! If you’d like to take part in a future sprint, connect with us on Slack or sign up for emails, or come to one of our upcoming meetings.