Welcome to the Blacklight Summit 2025 page. The summit will be held virtually December 8-10, 2025.
Please register for the summit using this link. Once you have registered, we will send you the Zoom link closer to the summit.
All participants will be introduced during the institutional demo session. For insitutional demo presenters, please read the instructions below. If you wish to sign up for lightning talks, please add your name and the title for your lightning talk to this document. You may also sign up to present or facilitate specific sessions here.
In addition to the main summit, we will also have socialization and networking sessions the weeks before the summit itself. Please check the Socialization & Networking section below for more information.
Finally, we will be using this document for community notes during the summit . We look forward to some great discussions this year!
The tentative agenda for the Blacklight Summit is below. All times are in the Eastern Time zone.
11:00 am - 11:15 am EST Introduction to summit
11:15 am - 1:00 pm EST Institutional demos/Introductions
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm EST Break
2:00 pm - 2:30 pm EST Blacklight related communities
2:30 pm - 3:30 pm EST Session: Solr + Search, performance, relevance, and testing
11:00 am - 11:30am EST Lightning talks
11:30 am - 12:30 pm EST Session: Interface customization
12:30 pm - 1:30 pm EST Break
1:30 pm - 2:30 pm EST Session: Usability
2:30 pm - 3:30 pm EST Session: State of the Blacklight community
11:00 am - 11:30am EST Lightning talks
11:30 am - 12:30 pm EST Project Blacklight plugins
12:30 pm - 1:30 pm EST Break
1:30 pm - 2:30 pm EST Session: Supporting the use of technologies such as linked data, AI, and IIIF
2:30 pm - 3:30 pm EST Closing
Each institution will be given a slot during the institutional demo session to introduce their attendees and share any Blacklight-related work and summit goals. If you plan on submitting an institutional demo for the summit, thank you for considering pre-recording or doing a live presentation of your institutional demo. Please review the instructions provided below.
This year, we’re offering participants the choice to either pre-record an institutional demo or do a live presentation of their demo. For a live presentation, you may choose whether or not to have that demo recorded.
Institutional demonstrations should be 5-7 minutes long and can cover a wide range of topics. These can range from - but are not limited to - recent development efforts, newly deployed production applications, in-development ideas, and sharing your experience about different aspects of Blacklight.
If you are pre-recording a demo, please read the following instructions. If you are doing a live demo, please read the instructions in the next section.
Zoom is recommended for recording your demo, but you are welcome to use an alternative platform of your choice to record. Although not required, Zoom includes the ability to generate a VTT caption file for your recording and we encourage you to do this. More information on generating this file can be found at https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115004794983-Using-audio-transcription-for-cloud-recordings-. Please provide a link to your recording by December 1st, 2025.
If you are doing a live demo during the summit, please let us know that you will be doing so by December 1st, 2025, so we can ensure to have it in our list of sessions. If you do not wish for your demo to be recorded, please let us know and we will pause recording during your demo.
As in previous years, we plan to upload institutional demo recordings to the Code4Lib channel.
This year, we have added a few informal socialization sessions to be held during the week of December 1st. Our aim is for each session to have 5-10 people and to be about 30 - 45 minutes long. One of the planning committee members will be present at each of the three scheduled sessions to help moderate.
Participants can choose between a variety of topics. A few topic ideas are sharing passion projects, talking about recent travels, or reflecting on your career path so far.
To join the session, please make sure you have registered for the conference. We will send out email reminders with Zoom links before the sessions to the list of registered participants. To help coordinate, please also sign up here if you are interested in participating in the networking sessions.
We are adhering to the code of conduct as defined by the larger Code4Lib Community. Please review the code of conduct here.
Jesi Buell (Cornell)
Tricia Clayton (Emory)
Justin Coyne (Stanford)
Huda Khan (Stanford)
Patrick Perkins (University of Pennsylvania)
Sarah Proctor (Notch8)
Kevin Reiss (Princeton)
Nikitas Tampakis (University of Pennsylvania)
Information about previous Blacklight summits can be found here.