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This is Islandora

Islandora is an open-source framework that provides the necessary tools to use a Drupal website as a fully-functional Digital Assets Management System.

Islandora:

  • Is native Drupal - With Islandora, you can create preservation-ready digital resources using Drupal nodes, media, files, and taxonomy terms. A site with a ready-made suite of customized Drupal resource types and configurations that illustrate Islandora's capabilities is available as the Islandora Starter Site module.
  • Integrates with Fedora - Drupal resources can be stored in Lyrasis's Fedora Repository (version 5.0 or greater) as binaries (files) and RDF metadata.
  • Uses microservices - Islandora provides an architecture for messaging and integration with any number of microservices, that provide services outside of the Drupal framework. Islandora's Crayfish suite of microservices provides functionality for synchronizing resources into Fedora and for automatically generating helper files, called derivatives.

  • Can handle messages at scale - Islandora created Alpaca, an integration middleware based on Apache Camel, to handle messaging and queueing at an enterprise scale. To the user, this means large batch uploads can be processed gracefully.

  • Offers digital preservation features - Using a robust storage layer for preservation (Fedora), and generating technical metadata with FITS, are digital preservation tools provided by our automated installation methods. Community members have created additional features for doing digital preservation using Islandora, which are not yet part of our automated setup.

  • Exposes data to harvesters - Metadata about resources is available as linked data through the JSON-LD serialization module, and can be made available through Drupal, Fedora, or a triplestore. Islandora Starter Site also offers a full configuration for exposing OAI-PMH so that metadata can be harvested by aggregators, and IIIF support means images in Islandora can be viewed in any IIIF-compliant viewer.
  • Offers flexibility - As Islandora content is Drupal content, migrations and batch editing can be done through Drupal's built-in migrate framework and vocabularies can be created using Drupal taxonomies. Contributed Drupal modules such as Solr Search API enable in-site search, and Matomo Analytics provides usage metrics for site analytics.
  • Is a community - A dedicated, active community of users and developers is working to push new features, collaborate on improvements, design custom solutions, and create extended functionality. Some of these for Islandora 8 take the form of Recipes.

Try Islandora

Online Sandbox

Try Islandora without installing anything at sandbox.islandora.ca.

Login credentials for the sandbox can be found here.

Anyone can log in to this sandbox as an administrator and explore the interface! However, this site is refreshed every night so your changes will not be permanent. This site uses the Islandora Starter Site. This is not the only way that Islandora can be made to work! This sandbox includes some sample content and configuration (such as views and blocks) to increase its usefulness as a sandbox. Learn more about the Islandora Starter Site.

Ansible Playbook

Islandora can be installed via an an Ansible Playbook, a machine-operable set of instructions which provisions the full Islandora stack. It can be used to create a locally installed Islandora (requiring your computer to have Vagrant and Virtualbox) or can be used to provision a remote Linux server. The provisioning process involves many steps where software is downloaded and installed, so it can take a while. There is an option to get a basic ("standard") site, or to install a suite of demo configurations known as the Demo Install Profile. See Installation - Ansible Playbook for more details.

Docker

Islandora sites can also be created using Docker. This can be done using the ISLE-DC project, which launches the Islandora Docker images created by Isle Buildkit. Like in the Ansible Playbook, there is an option to use a pre-built demo site, or build it completely from scratch. (There is also an option to build the demo site on command, which takes a bit more time, or to use ISLE-DC to build up the environment to support a Drupal site that you have already exported.) See Installation - Docker ISLE for more details

Join the Community

The Islandora community is an active group of users, managers, librarians, documenters, and developers from galleries, libraries, archives, museums, and other institutions worldwide. We welcome discussion and contribution through various mailing lists, channels, interest groups, and calls. The Islandora community operates under the Islandora Code Of Conduct. See our Contributing Guidelines for more information.

Documentation for previous versions

Documentation for Islandora 6 and 7 is on the Lyrasis documentation wiki.

Last update: June 7, 2023