The current catalog implementation is making use of Blacklight, an open source project that utilizes Ruby on Rails and provides discovery interfaces for Solr indexes. A number of other libraries and cultural heritage institutions are also implementing Blacklight as their library catalogs or as a search interface to digital collections

A prototype catalog implementation made use of the eXtensible catalog (XC) open source software project, utilizing in particular its modular structure, FRBR Based data model, and Metadata Services Toolkit.  One initial goal when we were developing the prototype in XC was for the catalog to serve as an aggregator of data from various sources. XC was designed particularly to solve this problem.  However, for practical reasons, we ended up narrowing our focus to making the Perseus catalog data available, so XC’s aggregation and normalization features were less critical. This, coupled with limited resources available to build and maintain Transformation Services for the CTS, MODS, and MADS metadata, which aren’t so far supported by XC, led us to take the simpler approach of using Blacklight. However, our experience with and the availability of the open source XC software enabled us to think through some of the design issues and requirements for making the catalog available to a broader audience, and for the types of resource discovery and navigation features we need to provide. Details behind this process have been more fully documented on the Perseus blog.