How the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library Modernized Its Digital Repository to Better Serve Three Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Protect Vital Cultural History.

The AUC Woodruff Library serves as the consortial library for three Historically Black Colleges and Universities in Atlanta: Morehouse College, Spelman College, and Clark Atlanta University, and their affiliated legacy institutions.

As the official archive for Morehouse and Clark Atlanta, and a close partner to Spelman, the Library supports a powerful mix of institutional scholarship and archival collections. Its digital repository includes:

This is mission-critical work: preserving and providing access to collections that document African American achievement after the emancipation of slavery, social movements and activism, African American leadership, and student life, making it discoverable to students and researchers worldwide.

By 2018, the Library was operating several content management platforms for archival collections and current scholarship, lacking the ability for customization and integration. The result was fragmented systems, limited metadata flexibility, poor display of multi-format archival collections, rising costs, and a dated user experience.

The team migrated to Legacy Islandora to unify the environment. But heavy customization created fragile dependencies, especially in search and filtering. Small changes had ripple effects, and with Modern Islandora being released, a migration was inevitable. The next move had to be sustainable.

The Library evaluated numerous content management and repository platforms. Islandora stood out for one reason: flexibility without lock-in. It could support a single platform serving three institutions, both institutional repository and digital collections workflows, and open-source extensibility.

Just as important was choosing the right implementation partner. With limited internal technical capacity, responsiveness mattered. They chose Discovery Garden as their partner.

With lessons learned from their last migration, the team made a strategic shift: simplify.

Instead of customizing core functionality, they focused customization primarily on branding and institutional representation. They also brought in archival expertise to guide decision-making, ensuring the system worked as intended rather than over-engineered.

The migration to modern Islandora was not without challenges, including configuration work required at launch, compressed timelines tied to grant funding, large-scale ingest managed internally, and the need for clearer visibility into development workflows. Despite the complexity, the collaboration remained active and transparent, with weekly meetings, shared documentation, and open feedback loops. Both teams emerged with valuable insights and a shared commitment to continuous improvement.

Today, the Library describes the new platform in simple terms: “way better.”

The improvements are tangible: faster and more accurate search, a modern and intuitive interface, visible filters and improved navigation, global metadata editing and find-and-replace, upload management stored within the system, easier collection rollback and re-ingest, and dramatically improved day-to-day administration.

Backend management is now “10 times better” than before. Instead of wrestling with fragile dependencies, the team can focus on expanding collections, refining metadata, and supporting researchers. Search tuning and UX refinements continue, but they are optimizations, not structural repairs.

For the AUC Woodruff Library, the migration reinforced a critical truth: digital infrastructure projects are as much about partnership as technology. What mattered most was responsive communication, direct access to the team, willingness to engage in candid feedback, and a shared focus on mission rather than just software. Today, the Library operates on a modern Islandora platform built to support growth, not constrain it.

The AUC Woodruff Library’s repository is more than a digital platform. It is a gateway to the institutional history of the Atlanta University Center including current and historical member institutions, research and scholarship produced by AUC faculty and students, civil rights collections, and global research visibility.

By modernizing its digital infrastructure with Discovery Garden, the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library ensured that its collections are not only preserved but positioned for the future. When the work is this important, the platform has to be ready for it.