Breaking down the steps needed for us to move to BL8. The first three steps are a must, last one will require some additional thought.

• upgrade rails to 7.x (point of interest that myaccount is also on 6.1)
• upgrade BL to 7.36
• resolve depreciation warnings
• upgrade to BL 8/ handle remove advanced search gem

At this time, the blacklight_advanced_search gem does not have a stable release compatible with BL8. In order to upgrade to BL8, we have two main options: use gem v8.0.0.alpha (currently in use at Stanford) or remove gem entirely since BL has functionality to handle advanced search without the gem. The latter is the ideal since the last stable release of the gem was in 2020 & even the alpha was 2022. This is likely to be an ongoing problem. It will just be a matter of how long the other steps take/how much work will need to go into pulling the gem out whether we remove it now or wait until a later maintenance cycle.