About Kora

Kora is an open source, web based digital repository platform designed for cultural heritage institutions, projects, and scholars interested in cataloging, curating, managing, preserving, sharing, and displaying digital objects and associated metadata. Kora allows users to build digital repository projects around a variety of digitized and born-digital objects, such as documents, images, audio, video, and 3D models. Beyond digital objects, Kora also allows users to include non-material culture entities, such as events or people, in their digital repository project. Kora’s architecture and user experience is centered around providing an unprecedented level of flexibility in a project's metadata structure. This flexibility allows users to create multiple forms for managing records, each with their own robust structure and metadata scheme. This flexibility allows institutions, projects, and individual scholars to customize Kora to meet the unique needs of their particular project or collection.

Kora is designed for distributed record creation and management among multiple collaborators. Users can work on the same project from anywhere in the world as long as they have access to the web. Each project in a Kora installation includes granular control over user permissions. Project administrators aren’t locked into specific types of users with fixed permissions. Instead, they can flexibly create different types of user permission groups to meet the needs of their project and collaborators. Users can be added and removed from those permission groups as the needs of the project dictates.

A single installation of Kora can support any number of discreet digital repository projects, thereby making it a perfect solution for institutions and individuals looking for a single solution to support a variety of digital collections. While each project in a Kora installation is a silo with its own users and records, users can search across all projects for which they have access within an installation. This makes Kora a perfect solution for institutions interested in managing separate collections or projects under the same institutional umbrella. In addition, the Kora API can be used to display records (including searching and browsing) in a public facing website from across multiple projects in one Kora installation.

In order to support data portability and project workflows, Kora includes powerful import and export tools. Records (object + metadata) can be imported as XML, JSON, and CSV and exported as XML or JSON individually or in a batch. In keeping with the need to ensure authenticity and integrity of uploaded and imported files, Kora automatically generates fixity information on all ingested files, which can be used to verify that files are free from tampering and corruption.

Developed and actively maintained by Michigan State University’s Matrix: The Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, Kora is released under a GNU GPL 2.0 open source license and available for download from GitHub at https://github.com/matrix-msu/kora.