Open Source Academic Library Search Software

The Canadiana collections are one of the largest collections of digitized Canadian documentary heritage in the world. The website used to make the collection available to the public was initially developed as a monolithic application using the Perl-based Catalyst framework. Over time the codebase had become unwieldy to the extent that the team was afraid to touch the application to provide much requested features to users, lest they break something. After serving the collection well for a number of years, the interface was beginning to show its age and lag behind the times. Since the development team (me included) for Canadiana is small, and our organization is a non profit, we really wanted to adopt an open source solution so that we could work with other developers and provide more features to end users. After a landscape analysis, and interviewing our librarian staff, I chose an open source system highly configurable Rails project called Blacklight to replace the old search interface. To see how our end users would respond to the default configuration Blacklight software, I spun up an instance of Blacklight with minimal Canadiana theming. This would allow us to determine what, if anything, we should focus our attention on as developers before making the transition. this approach also meant the results would be impactful for all of the libraries across the globe who have rolled out Blacklight based websites.