blacklight

Thumbnails in Warclight

One feature of Blacklight that I’ve always wanted to setup in Warclight is displaying thumbnails in the results display. Getting this setup is a bit tricky. But, since Warclight is standardizing metadata on webarchive-discovery’s Solr schema.xml, we avail ourselves to a number of fields available for use for a potential implementation. The url field is the obvious choice, but the problem is that Blacklight out of the box will try and display a thumbnail for every url field value you give to config.

See a Little Warclight

What if you have a few terabytes of web archive data setting around, and wanted to shine a little light into them? Well, the good news is that now you can! The British Library’s UK Web Archive initiative has created some great software over the last couple years to allow you to index your web archive content into Solr, and provide access to it in a discovery interface called Shine. You can check Shine out in action here (for the British Library’s collections) or here (for our Canadian politics one).