One Year In: What We’ve Built Together
One year ago, Discovery Garden and Born-Digital merged with a shared goal: to make it easier to manage and share the world’s digital collections and better support the institutions that safeguard them.
Before the merger, the two organizations already had a lot in common culturally. Collectively, we had more than 20 years of experience working with libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions to develop, migrate, and manage digital repositories, and we held similar ideas about the future of digital repository technology and services. At the same time, we brought complementary strengths and areas of expertise to the work. We were also already colleagues in the community and had partnered on client projects.
We talked about what bringing those strengths together would make possible. A year later, we can look at what that has meant in practice.
A deeper bench
Discovery Garden brought significant experience in complex migrations and large-scale enterprise implementations. Born-Digital, founded by our now-CTO, Noah Smith, brought subject matter expertise and a packaged repository solution that has become our flagship, Aurora.
The result is a deeper bench across repository development, migrations, project management, support, infrastructure, and product development. We remain a relatively small team, but behind each project are people who understand both the technology and the realities of managing digital collections.
Much of our team’s work happens behind the scenes and isn’t always visible in a feature or product release. With more expertise to draw from, we’re better equipped to identify and assess potential risks and respond carefully when challenges arise.
A better client experience
Over the past year, we’ve focused on the systems and processes behind the client experience. Our support teams now work from a new shared help desk, combining knowledge from across the organization and helping us respond more quickly. We’ve also strengthened project management and increased post-launch support, improving how we work with clients throughout implementation and once their repository is live.
That continuity matters because getting the technology right is only part of a successful implementation. Digital repository projects combine complex technical requirements, specialized institutional knowledge, and collections that matter deeply to the communities they serve. Understanding how those pieces fit together helps us ask the right questions, anticipate challenges, and make informed decisions alongside our clients.
More capacity to build
By joining forces, we’ve been able to accelerate progress toward making digital repositories more accessible, more capable, and easier to manage.
Aurora is one example. Over the past year, we’ve continued to develop the fully managed, cloud-hosted platform around a simple idea: institutions shouldn’t need extensive internal technical resources to manage and share their digital collections.
That same investment in development extends across the repositories and services we support. Our team is working to improve the tools, infrastructure, and capabilities available to clients across different repository environments.
Looking ahead
There’s still plenty we want to build on and improve. One year in, we have a clearer sense of what we can accomplish together and where we’re going next.
As we mark this anniversary, we’re also taking the final step in our merger: Born-Digital will now operate under the Discovery Garden name. The people, expertise, and perspectives that shaped both organizations are part of the Discovery Garden we are today, and part of what we’ll carry forward.
The Four Seasons, Abraham Bosse, mid-to-late 17th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.
