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Athena Archive

A self-hosted digital-archive platform — the modern successor to Omeka S.

Running a small archive should not mean wrestling a fragile PHP stack and a dated workbench. Athena rebuilds the ideas worth keeping — objects described by curated standard vocabularies, collections, IIIF interoperability — on a typed, tested, modern stack (FastAPI + MariaDB, Next.js, OIDC), and treats archival integrity as a product feature: fixity verification, soft deletion, immutable originals, and a permanent audit trail.

One instance serves one archive.

  • Operators get a three-container compose file, a single hostname, an any-OIDC auth contract, and documentation good enough to deploy, back up, restore, and upgrade without ever talking to us.
  • Staff (110 people) get a deliberate, one-object-at-a-time curation workbench where triage gates publication.
  • The public gets a fast, accessible (WCAG 2.1 AA), citable window onto the collection.

Status: pre-1.0, under active development. The reference instance is theaac, carrying an over-1TB migrated Omeka collection.

Components

Component Role
athena-api Backend API — FastAPI + MariaDB; IIIF Presentation + Image API, OIDC resource server
athena-frontend Public site + staff workbench — Next.js RSC, Auth.js OIDC client
athena-file Standalone Python library for archive-file operations (hashing, thumbnails, metadata extraction, fixity); also the API's media toolkit
athena-docs Documentation site — user, administrator, and developer guides at athena-archive.org
this repo Platform front door — roadmap and public issue tracker

The application repositories are private while the platform is pre-1.0; source-publication timing is deliberately undecided. Everything is AGPL-3.0.

Roadmap

Ordered phases, no dates.

  1. Security and data safety — import hardening, data-integrity fixes, required OIDC audience validation, embedding locked down, SSRF surface removed, a written threat model, and a baseline security audit (ZAP + ASVS L1).
  2. Release engineering — green CI everywhere, versioned images published on version bump, branch protection, this repo populated as the public front door.
  3. Design sessions — the metadata model, the derivatives pipeline (thumbnails, IIIF static tiles, AV posters), and a single manifest-driven viewer; specs land in the docs.
  4. 1.0 feature completion — trashcan/soft-delete, fixity sweep, search and browse, sitemap, i18n layer (English ships), WCAG 2.1 AA across public and admin, and a Playwright end-to-end suite as the release gate.
  5. Documentation completion — user, administrator, and developer guides; deploy runbook, backup contract, tested restore procedure.
  6. Reference instance to 1.0 — Athena is 1.0 when theaac runs on real traffic and a written verification checklist passes: versioned releases with rollback, a tested restore, a green end-to-end release gate, a completed security audit, and stranger-deployable docs.

Non-goals (deliberate): multi-tenancy, OAI-PMH, public user accounts, notifications, bulk editing, in-app analytics, object storage (in 1.0).

Issues

This tracker is the public support and feedback channel for the platform.

License

AGPL-3.0.