How Whitman College Made Its Digital Repository More Sustainable Without Starting Over

Whitman College is a private liberal arts college in Walla Walla, Washington, serving about 1,450 students. Its digital collections platform, ARMINDA, is named in honor of Arminda Fix, the college’s first professional librarian. The platform brings together student honors theses, faculty scholarship, and archival materials from the Whitman College and Northwest Archives, along with materials made accessible through community partnerships.

Today, ARMINDA holds 11,212 objects, including 3,089 issues of Whitman’s student newspapers. The platform also provides access to oral histories and materials from the Sheehan Gallery and Maxey Museum. By bringing these varied collections together, ARMINDA gives researchers, students, faculty, and members of the public a single place to discover and explore Whitman’s digital materials. For Whitman’s five-person digital services team, flexibility has been central to managing this range of materials and providing access to them. “We have a lot of control over our metadata, over how our digital objects are presented and how they’re maintained, and how we provide that access,” said Amy Blau, Scholarly Communications Librarian and Repository Manager at Whitman College.

Whitman began working with Born-Digital in 2018 to migrate its legacy digital repository to Islandora. In 2022, Whitman and Born-Digital worked together again on an updated digital repository environment that was hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), with Born-Digital providing maintenance and support services. Following the merger of Born-Digital and Discovery Garden, Whitman continued its partnership with the same technical team.

In this arrangement, Whitman was responsible for the AWS account and tracked its own usage and storage costs. For a while, this model worked well, but by 2025, the Whitman team was rethinking whether it still made sense. The repository design and user experience were well matched to their needs, but the team was ready to stop managing AWS directly. At the same time, hosting costs were becoming harder to predict, driven more by bot traffic and web scraping than by Whitman’s own content growth.

When Aurora, Discovery Garden’s fully managed digital collections platform, became an option, Whitman evaluated the costs. Hosting, maintenance, and support are bundled into the Aurora service package, giving Whitman a more predictable cost structure while eliminating the separate AWS expense. “Our biggest goal in the migration was that it would be a more sustainable model for us both in terms of costs, but also in terms of potential management on our side of lots of different platforms and places,” Amy said.

For the move to make sense, Whitman set a clear bar for success: the user interface and experience of the current repository should stay largely the same, and staff should be able to accomplish the same work, even if some workflows changed. Certain student theses and other materials are restricted to the Whitman community under agreements with copyright holders, while others are embargoed until a set date. Those access controls needed to remain in place.

Metadata was another concern. Whitman had built its repository around custom fields specific to its collections, and remapping, combining, or dropping those fields would have meant significant rework. The Discovery Garden team confirmed the existing structure could be carried over to Aurora. “For us, that was really what made us think this would be feasible in the time constraints,” Amy said. “We were not going to have to remap metadata or reconsider metadata or rethink what our field structure was.”

After taking into account Whitman’s requirements, Discovery Garden staff worked out a “lift and shift” migration plan. Since the team was familiar with the technical profile of Whitman’s existing site, much of the usual upfront preparation was already in place. Rather than preparing thousands of objects for a fresh ingest, Whitman’s team was mainly responsible for a final review once the content had been moved: checking collection structure, verifying that metadata was where they expected it to be, and flagging anything that needed attention. The Discovery Garden team took care of the rest.

Whitman required the migration to be completed before the start of its new fiscal year, giving the teams just a few months. That placed the migration in the middle of the academic term rather than in the quieter summer months the team would have preferred. Even so, the project stayed manageable. “I was worried that it wouldn’t necessarily be such an easy lift and shift,” said Paige Morfitt, Metadata Librarian at Whitman College. “I was very happy and very surprised that it actually was.”

For Amy, who had been through previous repository migrations, the difference stood out. “From our perspective, it was the least amount of work I’ve ever had to do on a migration. So that was kind of amazing.”

Whitman cut over to Aurora at the end of April 2026. The move reduced annual hosting, maintenance, and support costs by as much as 33% while carrying forward the metadata, access requirements, and key workflows the team had already built. It also meant one fewer system for the team to manage, and Discovery Garden provided guidance as Whitman decommissioned its AWS environment.

Just as importantly, the change was seamless for the people using ARMINDA. Students continued using it throughout the cutover, including through finals. Alexis Hickey, College Archivist and Head of Special Collections, works directly with many of the students and researchers who use the platform. “I’ve had no observable difference reported to me by users who are frequently using our site,” Alexis said.

Behind the scenes, a few things did change. One workflow Paige relied on for cleaning up taxonomy terms was no longer available in the same form after the move. The Discovery Garden team responded by creating two alternative ways for Paige to access the information she needed: a browsable view and a full JSON export. For Amy, that reflected how the team had defined success from the beginning. “It’s not that we have to be able to do it the same way, but we have to be able to get to the same result in terms of the work that we do and the workflows that we’re able to carry out.”

That responsiveness was consistent with Whitman’s experience working with the same team since their first repository migration together in 2018. “More often, I’ve taken longer to write the ticket than there’s been a delay in responding to the ticket,” Amy said.

With the move to Aurora complete, Whitman’s team is focused on what’s next. Current initiatives include expanding a pilot program for green open access faculty scholarship, growing postcustodial collections built in partnership with community members in the Walla Walla Valley, and continuing to explore digital accessibility, including new features in Aurora such as Able Player, an accessible media player.

Amy also sees value in the shared approach to development across Aurora institutions. “I think there’s a lot of potential in being on a system with other people that is a shared system that has these shared capabilities,” Amy said. For Whitman, that shared model means ARMINDA can continue to benefit as Aurora evolves.