Cloud-Based Islandora

Islandora empowers cultural heritage institutions to deliver on their missions of preservation and access to knowledge, ensuring that their collections become and remain accessible to all.

We’re proud to introduce Aurora — our cloud-hosted Islandora solution built to help you sustain and share your digital collections with ease.

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Simple and Effective

Simplify your digital collection’s management and access with Aurora’s intuitive interface and comprehensive management tools.

Create and revise metadata with both batch and single ingest and update tools. Create the repository you need with customizable branding, editable navigation, and robust access controls!

Our fully hosted solution on AWS includes maintenance, backups, and expert support. Our goal is to empower you to focus on your content!

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Powerful and Connected

Aurora delivers open-source flexibility with Islandora and Drupal at its core, allowing customization and community collaboration without a software engineering team.

Looking for integrations? Enable harvesting via our default OAI-PMH feed, and connect to other services with various APIs, Google Analytics, Matomo/Piwik, and Single Sign-On solutions including CAS, OAuth, and LDAP.

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Intuitive and Accessible

Aurora delivers an intuitive user experience with powerful search, faceted browsing, and full-text indexing, making it easy for users to find what they need.

Ensure inclusive access with WCAG 2.2 AA compliance, rich media viewers, and built-in IIIF support.

Streamline collections management with flexible metadata options and automatically generated derivatives.

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Responsive and Mobile-ready

In addition to accessibility compliance, our theme seamlessly adapts to smaller screens for maximum usability and display on mobile and tablet devices.

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FEATURES

Aurora is built on the trusted open-source foundation of Islandora and Drupal.

Islandora's innovative core modules are developed by the community for the common good, and leverage Drupal’s substantial ecosystem. Aurora offers a streamlined, fully-hosted, and optimized out-of-the-box Islandora solution.
Aurora brings the power of Islandora to the cloud: secure, discoverable, and cost-effective.
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Key Features

Aurora delivers on the core use case of modern digital collections repositories: discovery and access to metadata and digitized content.

Rich Content Support

Easily manage and display a wide range of materials, including nested collections, images, documents, books, newspapers, compound objects, audio, and video.

Flexible Relationships

Items can belong to multiple collections or compound objects, enabling both item-level and group-level metadata associations.

Configurable Access Restrictions

Control object visibility using date ranges, IP filtering, or authenticated user attributes, with restricted items returned in search as metadata-only.

Automatic Derivatives

Thumbnails and service files are automatically generated for images, PDFs, and video, reducing manual effort.  Collections, compound objects, and books can inherit thumbnails from their first child object—or you can manually set or override thumbnails as needed.

User Experience

Aurora’s responsive theme is built for accessibility and usability. Designed with discovery, display, and digital collection management in mind, it offers a seamless, user-centered experience across devices. Our goal is full compliance with WCAG 2.2 AA standards, and we openly share our VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) to ensure transparency and accountability.

Search and Discovery

  • Prominent, intuitive search interface, available on every page. Faceted search results including date range sliders and a variety of sorting options
  • A customizable advanced search interface
  • Full text search and automatically generated OCR and hOCR extracted text
Aurora's search and filtering interface

Media Viewer Support

  • The interactive IIIF Mirador Viewer is the default for Images, Books, and Newspapers — with full-text search within the object support via hOCR layers and automatically generated IIIF manifests for all individual images, multi-page objects, and newspapers.
  • Aurora supports TIFF, JPEG, JP2, and GIF formats. OpenSeadragon is also available as an alternate viewer for all image formats.
  • The PDF.js viewer display is the default for PDF Documents, including support for embedded full text layers.
  • The Video.js display is the default for locally hosted audio and video, supporting video captions in VTT format. AVI, MOV, and MP4 video formats are available, as are MP3, WAV, and AAC audio formats.
  • Remotely hosted Audio and Video can be sourced from YouTube, Brightcove, and Vimeo, among others.
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Detail of the famous woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa showing a giant wave cresting with boat and Mount Fuji in the background.Digital viewer interface displaying a detailed calligraphic illustration of a ship’s stern with intricate Arabic calligraphy in gold and blue.

Administrative Tools

Aurora delivers on the core use case of modern digital collections repositories: discovery and access to metadata and digitized content.

Branding and Customization

With Aurora, administrators can easily customize logos, fonts, and branding palette to reflect their institution’s identity.
Edit navigation and footer menus, add pages for non-repository content, and unlock key Drupal features like configurable XML sitemaps and social sharing options.

User Management and Access Control

Aurora offers essential user management features—create, delete, and assign roles to control who can find, view, or download content.
With role-based permissions, IP restrictions, and date-based embargoes, Aurora gives institutions precise control over content access—balancing openness with security and compliance.

Metadata and Vocabulary Management

Aurora offers a powerful, flexible content management interface for managing metadata and controlled vocabularies. Built on Islandora’s adaptable, MODS-adjacent schema, it gives administrators the freedom to customize metadata fields, ensuring a tailored experience that isn’t locked into a specific standard.

Batch Ingest/Update

Access powerful batch ingest and editing through Islandora Workbench using CSV datasheets.
Admins can easily filter and manage content in bulk via the Drupal interface, with helpful tools like a “missing thumbnails” view to quickly identify and resolve ingest issues.

Integrations

Repositories rely on integrations with harvesters, usage tracking, and services like Single Sign-On providers. Drupal supports a wide range of APIs to connect with external systems and exchange data.

Harvesting

A default OAI-PMH feed comes pre-configured, allowing external harvesters to draw from all published repository items.

SSO Solutions

Aurora integrates with a wide variety of Single Sign-On solutions, including CAS, OAuth, and LDAP. Others may be supported as well – please ask if yours is not listed here.

Metrics Integration

Aurora includes the ability to integrate with an existing Google Analytics or Matomo/Piwik installation via popular Drupal integration modules.
PRICING

Ongoing Services

For one flat monthly fee, each Aurora client receives maintenance, support, and hosting.
We are always improving Aurora: ongoing updates are always included in our hosting package, and will roll out with scheduled site maintenance.

Maintenance

  • Monthly security updates to modules
  • Minimal downtime

Support

  • Access to our private knowledge base
  • Business-hours access to our customer portal and expert Support Desk resources via email

Hosting

  • Hosting in Amazon Web Services data centers
  • Rolling 30-day backups

Cloud-Based Islandora

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