Islandora Open-Source Digital Asset Management

Islandora is a free open-source software framework designed to help institutions and organizations collaboratively author, manage, discover, and steward digital collections across data types and knowledge domains.

🚀 Overview

Islandora is an extensible, modular open-source digital repository ecosystem that enables collaborative authorship, management, display, and preservation of digital content at scale. Powered by Drupal modules, it connects content to a flexible CMS while integrating enterprise tools like Apache Solr for search and optional Fedora for preservation.

This project solves the problem of preserving and managing diverse digital assets—such as images, documents, audio/video, books, and binaries—for cultural institutions, allowing them to build accessible, standards-compliant collections without proprietary software.

It is built for governments, libraries, archives, museums, and their audiences, including developers and information professionals.

The Islandora community built it to adhere to global best-practices and open standards, fostering collaboration through a non-profit foundation since its origins at the University of Prince Edward Island's library in 2006.

✨ Key Features

Support for diverse content types including images, PDFs, audio/video, books/newspapers, and binary files with display in modern browsers and IIIF integration for scalable image access.
Preservation capabilities like fixity checking, bag-it compliant packages, content versioning, PRONOM linking, and administrative metadata.
Metadata management with support for MODS and other formats, user-friendly Drupal forms, serialization, and exposure via OAI-PMH/SPARQL.
Enterprise search with Apache Solr for faceted browsing, simple/faceted search, and configurable research indexing.
Security and workflows via Drupal roles/permissions, embargoes, and customizable access controls.
Optional: microservices for transcoding, OCR, and media workflows using FFmpeg, Tesseract, etc.

🛠 Tech Stack

Frontend: Drupal (PHP), Apache web server, Composer, Drush
Backend: Tomcat (Java apps), ActiveMQ/Alpaca (middleware), Crayfish microservices
Database: MySQL/PostgreSQL (Drupal/Fedora), Blazegraph (graph DB), Apache Solr (search)
Auth: Drupal users/roles, Syn (Fedora authorization)
Media/Processing: Cantaloupe (IIIF server), Mirador (viewer), FFmpeg, ImageMagick, Tesseract OCR, FITS
Hosting: Self-hosted, Docker (ISLE), Ansible playbook
Optional: Fedora Commons repository

👥 Who Is This For?

This project is useful for:

Libraries, archives, and museums managing digital collections
Developers extending repository functionality
Institutions migrating from legacy systems or building institutional repositories

📸 Screenshots / Demo

Live demo: https://sandbox.islandora.ca
GitHub: https://github.com/Islandora

🔥 Project Status

🟢 Actively building

Last updated: 2026-03-24

❓ FAQ

Is this project free?

Yes / Open Source (Completely free as open-source software.)

Is the source code available?

Yes — https://github.com/Islandora

Can I contribute?

Join the community via GitHub issues/PRs, Slack, Google Group, working groups, or wiki feedback. New contributors follow the onboarding checklist on the community wiki.