Features

Aurora is built on the trusted open-source foundation of Islandora and Drupal.

Islandora's innovative core modules are developed by the community for the common good, and leverage Drupal’s substantial ecosystem. Aurora offers a streamlined, fully-hosted, and optimized out-of-the-box Islandora solution.

Aurora brings the power of Islandora to the cloud: secure, discoverable, and cost-effective.

Key Features

Aurora delivers on the core use case of modern digital collections repositories: discovery and access to metadata and digitized content.

  • Rich Content Support: Easily manage and display a wide range of materials, including nested collections, images, documents, books, newspapers, compound objects, audio, and video.

  • Flexible Relationships: Items can belong to multiple collections or compound objects, enabling both item-level and group-level metadata associations.

  • Configurable Access Restrictions: Control object visibility using date ranges, IP filtering, or authenticated user attributes, with restricted items returned in search as metadata-only.

  • Automatic Derivatives: Thumbnails and service files are automatically generated for images, PDFs, and video, reducing manual effort.  Collections, compound objects, and books can inherit thumbnails from their first child object—or you can manually set or override thumbnails as needed.

User Experience

Aurora’s responsive theme is built for accessibility and usability. Designed with discovery, display, and digital collection management in mind, it offers a seamless, user-centered experience across devices. Our goal is full compliance with WCAG 2.2 AA standards, and we openly share our VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) to ensure transparency and accountability.

  • Prominent, intuitive search interface, available on every page. Faceted search results including date range sliders and a variety of sorting options

  • A customizable advanced search interface

  • Full text search and automatically generated OCR and hOCR extracted text

Search and Discovery

  • The interactive IIIF Mirador Viewer is the default for Images, Books, and Newspapers — with full-text search within the object support via hOCR layers and automatically generated IIIF manifests for all individual images, multi-page objects, and newspapers. 

    • Aurora supports TIFF, JPEG, JP2, and GIF formats. OpenSeadragon is also available as an alternate viewer for all image formats. 

  • The PDF.js viewer display is the default for PDF Documents, including support for embedded full text layers.

  • The Video.js display is the default for locally hosted audio and video, supporting video captions in VTT format. AVI, MOV, and MP4 video formats are available, as are MP3, WAV, and AAC audio formats.

    • Remotely hosted Audio and Video can be sourced from YouTube, Brightcove, and Vimeo, among others.

Media Viewer Support

Administrative Tools

Aurora streamlines the administrative experience to simplify repository management and reduce ongoing costs, giving you more time to focus on your collections.

Branding & Customization

With Aurora, administrators can easily customize logos, fonts, and branding palette to reflect their institution’s identity.

Edit navigation and footer menus, add pages for non-repository content, and unlock key Drupal features like configurable XML sitemaps and social sharing options.

Aurora offers a powerful, flexible content management interface for managing metadata and controlled vocabularies. Built on Islandora’s adaptable, MODS-adjacent schema, it gives administrators the freedom to customize metadata fields, ensuring a tailored experience that isn’t locked into a specific standard.

Metadata and Vocabulary Management

Aurora offers essential user management features—create, delete, and assign roles to control who can find, view, or download content.

With role-based permissions, IP restrictions, and date-based embargoes, Aurora gives institutions precise control over content access—balancing openness with security and compliance.

User Management and Access Control

Access powerful batch ingest and editing through Islandora Workbench using CSV datasheets.

Admins can easily filter and manage content in bulk via the Drupal interface, with helpful tools like a “missing thumbnails” view to quickly identify and resolve ingest issues.

Batch Ingest/Update

Integrations

Repositories do not exist in isolation — the ability to interact with harvesters, track usage metrics, and integrate with external services such as Single Sign-On identity providers is essential. Drupal offers the ability to create and configure a wide variety of APIs that can connect with other systems to push or pull data.

Harvesting

A default OAI-PMH feed comes pre-configured, allowing external harvesters to draw from all published repository items.

SSO Solutions

Aurora integrates with a wide variety of Single Sign-On solutions, including CAS, OAuth, and LDAP. Others may be supported as well – please ask if yours is not listed here.

Metrics Integration

Aurora includes the ability to integrate with an existing Google Analytics or Matomo/Piwik installation via popular Drupal integration modules.

Ongoing Services

Worry-free hosting, expert support, and reliable security. We manage the tech so you can focus on your content.

Fully Hosted

Aurora allows clients to pay a single monthly fee for maintenance, support, and hosting. Hosting is provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), including monitoring, S3 bulk storage, automated backups, and SSL certificates. Learn more.

We handle all of the ongoing maintenance, allowing you to focus on the content instead of the technical requirements of running a digital repository.

Expert Support

Aurora includes business-hours support from Born-Digital’s expert team, with access to our private Islandora knowledge base and dedicated Support Desk via email and customer portal.

Backups and Security

Born-Digital leverages multiple AWS data and backup services to securely store files and metadata in geographically redundant locations. We maintain rolling backups for a minimum of 30 days and retain one on-demand snapshot indefinitely.

As an AWS Partner, we adhere to industry best practices to ensure the highest standards of data security and integrity.

Always Improving

Aurora benefits from ongoing enhancements to the Islandora platform and our cloud infrastructure. We handle updates and improvements behind the scenes, so you’re always running the latest, most secure version without lifting a finger.

Sound good?

 

Need something a little more customized?

While Aurora can do great things, it cannot offer the unlimited flexibility and extensibility that is possible with a bespoke installation. Institutions requiring functionality beyond what is included in the Aurora package, including Fedora back-end storage, may be interested in our Enterprise tier solutions. These start with the same initial feature package as Aurora, and then we customize and extend to meet your specific requirements.

Clients may upgrade from an Aurora installation to an Enterprise one if their needs grow in the future.

Further details are available at born-digital.com