Welcome to the GeoBlacklight Documentation pages
GeoBlacklight is an open-source Ruby on Rails software application for discovering geospatial content, including GIS datasets, web services, and digitized paper maps.
Tip
See an unfamiliar term? Use the search bar to find its definition in the glossary.
How to use this site
Our documentation is split into four themes:
Tutorials
These walkthroughs are designed to help new users learn more about GeoBlacklight, how to add metadata to it, and how to customize it.
How To Guides
These guides provide real-world instructions for installing, upgrading, and adding customizations.
Reference
The reference pages include our glossary, the components of configurable application files, and other look up tables.
Explanation
The explanation pages include background information and recommendations for running GeoBlacklight in production.
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