One of the things I've been looking into is the feasibility of using Blacklight as TC Library's discovery tool.

Blacklight is an open source Ruby on Rails gem that provides a discovery interface for any Solr index. Blacklight provides a default user interface which is customizable via the standard Rails (templating) mechanisms. Blacklight accommodates heterogeneous data, allowing different information displays for different types of objects.

Blacklight sits on top of a library's current ILS. The reason for using a product like Blacklight is to allow libraries to meet user demands as web technologies rapidly advance without being dependent on enterprise ILS vendors to make updates, which are often infrequent and outdated by the time they are released.

Blacklight is able to enhance/add index, search, and faceted browsing capabilities. Deeper/expanded searches are possible within the libraries collection. In addition, there are future plans to make searches savable in Zotero and Refworks. A number of other open source ILS are available, including Scriblio, VuFind, eXtensible Catalog, LibraryFind, and PasPar 2.

Columbia's Library currently offers Clio Beta (different from their current ILS, known as Clio), which utilizes Blacklight. Have a look at both and see how they are the same/different.

After wrestling with the installation process last week, I'm finally ready to explore what customizations can be done with the product. If anyone's interested in playing around with it, let me know, as I'm a novice RoR guy and might seek out some help from some of you programmers! Any good resources out there you can point me to? Thanks!