Project: Blacklight DL: A search engine for a digital library with thousands of titles.

Background: The University of Virginia's Digital Library's old search engine crashed when a query resulted in too many hits. They wanted to convert the search engine to one running on an open source platform. However, UVa Technical staff did not have the necessary resources available to develop or implement this new solution. Given the severity and regularity of the system crashes, a solution was required immediately.

Solution: The OSC team suggested a Solr backend (an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library) and a Ruby on Rails (RoR)-based end-user interface

Summary: The end result was a rapidly built, license-free solution that enables thousands of student, faculty and staff users to quickly and easily search the entire UVA digital library from their PC.