Discovery Garden and Born-Digital Announce Strategic Merger
Accelerating Innovation with Digital Repository Solutions
Combined organization brings over 20 years of Islandora and GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) leadership to serve both large and small cultural heritage institutions.
Discovery Garden and Born-Digital have officially merged as of September 5, 2025. Together, they are joining forces to become a leading provider in digital repository development services, with deep experience in Islandora solutions. The newly merged company will offer a full range of open-source repository services, from a newly launched cloud-based product to large-scale systems for enterprise clients.
Building the future of intuitive open-source repository solutions
The merger combines Discovery Garden’s 15 years of experience leading technical migrations—founded by the original creators of Islandora—with Born-Digital’s cutting-edge Aurora platform. "This merger is a strong commitment to the future of digital repositories purposely built for organizations in the GLAM sector," said Discovery Garden CEO Gerry Lawless. "By combining our custom Islandora development depth with Born-Digital's product innovations and customer-centric approach, we're strengthening and investing in the larger cultural heritage ecosystem. We know these institutions need solutions informed by and for the community, and not generic platforms adapted to fit our sector."
Supporting repositories of every size for institutions of every size
The merged organization’s strategy includes the Aurora platform, which eliminates traditional barriers to Islandora adoption. Aurora offers a complete, full-featured Islandora repository solution with a single monthly fee covering hosting, maintenance, and support—removing the need for extensive internal IT or development teams. With Discovery Garden’s proven expertise in major migrations and enterprise projects, the merger builds on that momentum, offering Aurora’s simplicity where it’s needed most, and deep customization where it matters most.
Unparalleled depth of expertise drives market innovation
Discovery Garden’s expanded team possesses exceptional expertise in understanding users and institutional needs, including scholarly output, research data, digital archives, and digital preservation. "We're uniting not just technical depth but comprehensive client service capability in one organization," said Born-Digital Founder & Discovery Garden CTO, Noah Smith. "This creates immediate opportunities to expand our services and responsiveness, while enabling our internal teams to evolve those services based on real user feedback and institutional needs. We’ve spent 10+ years solving the same problems as competitors, and now we’re excited to have the opportunity to do it together going forward!"
Ready to see how we can help your organization? To start the conversation reach out to info@discoverygarden.com
About Discovery Garden
For over 15 years, Discovery Garden has built and managed institutional repositories & digital collections for libraries, galleries, museums, and archives to preserve and access their prized digital assets. Discovery Garden is dedicated to helping organizations safeguard and share their prized digital assets.
About Born-Digital
Born-Digital empowers cultural heritage institutions to deliver on their missions of preservation and access to knowledge, ensuring that digitized objects become and remain accessible to all. They accomplish this by designing, building, and maintaining Open Source digital repository solutions, primarily utilizing Islandora.
