Aurora Walkthrough: Search and Discovery
Aurora is Discovery Garden's cloud-hosted and fully managed Islandora solution, designed to simplify repository management while providing an intuitive search and discovery experience for digital collections.
This walkthrough explores Aurora's collection presentation and search capabilities, highlighting the tools institutions can use to create intuitive, accessible, and engaging digital collections.
Customizing the Discovery Experience
Aurora provides a flexible discovery experience with customizable landing pages, branded navigation, featured content, static pages, and repository-wide or collection-specific search.
In this walkthrough, you’ll see:
- Customizable landing pages and branded navigation
- Static pages for content such as About, Contact, Policies, and Help sections
- Repository-wide and collection-specific search
- Search results, filters, and faceted browsing
Watch the walkthrough
Search and Navigation
Aurora supports keyword search, advanced search, metadata-driven facets, and collection-scoped search to help users locate relevant materials while giving institutions flexibility in how collections are organized and discovered.
The walkthrough highlights:
- Keyword and advanced search
- Faceted browsing and date filtering
- Grid and list display options
- Collection hierarchies and collection-scoped search
Content Presentation
Aurora supports multiple viewing experiences for images, documents, books, newspapers, audio, video, and compound objects. Flexible collection structures and relationships between objects provide additional context and improve discovery throughout digital collections.
The walkthrough also explores how institutions can:
- Organize collections and nested collections
- Present object metadata and relationships
- Display different content types using purpose-built viewers
- Support IIIF-powered viewing with Mirador
Accessibility and Interoperability
The platform is WCAG 2.2 AA compliant, and its publicly available VPAT supports institutional accessibility reviews.
Aurora also supports widely adopted standards, including IIIF for flexible image viewing and sharing across compatible platforms, and APIs that enable integration with other systems.
Explore Aurora
Visit the Aurora demo site to see the platform in action, including its search, discovery, and collection presentation capabilities.
Interested in learning more?
Contact Discovery Garden to schedule an Aurora demo, discuss your repository needs, or learn how a fully managed Islandora platform can support your institution's digital collections.
Map of an Unmarked Part of the Egyptian Coastline, from Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of Seafaring), manuscript copy, c. 17th century. The Walters Art Museum Open Access Collection.
