1. Overview

ARON (Archiv online) is a public portal that presents archival records: fonds, archival descriptions, finding aids, institutions and the access points that connect them, together with the digitized material attached to them. It is developed by LightComp and published under the Apache-2.0 license.

The portal does not create the records it shows. They are delivered by the separate Transfagent application, which reads them from source systems (Elza, PEvA, …) and pushes them to the portal over an internal SOAP interface. The portal stores them in PostgreSQL, indexes them for search and serves them to readers through a web interface and a public REST API.

1.1. What a deployment consists of

  • One executable jar (aron.jar) that contains the backend and the web interface. The same jar serves the portal at the root of a URL or under a subpath, without being rebuilt.

  • PostgreSQL as the primary store and the only component that needs a backup.

  • A search engine: Elasticsearch, the production engine, or the embedded Lucene engine that needs no external service (see Search).

  • A configuration directory next to the jar: the main application.yml, the display model of the records, the search facets, the page template and the branding. The release bundle ships a complete default configuration for a Czech archive.

Installation describes the installation, Upgrading the move to a newer version.

1.2. Who this guide is for

This guide is written for the administrators who install, configure and operate a deployment, and for the integrators who connect other systems to it. It describes what the portal does, what it can be configured to do and what it offers over its interfaces.

It deliberately does not contain help for the portal’s readers. Which sections, facets and features a reader sees depends on the deployment’s configuration and on the data its source systems deliver, so no two deployments look alike. Reader help is therefore written by the institution that runs the portal; the help-url setting points the HELP menu item at it (see Configuration). The same holds for the accessibility statement a public-sector body publishes about its portal.

Transfagent has its own documentation, released with that application. This guide covers the portal’s side of the interface only: the SOAP endpoints it exposes, what an import does inside the portal and how published data is withdrawn (see Operations).

1.3. How this documentation is versioned

Each version line of the portal (2.0, 2.1, …) has its own edition of this guide, published at https://docs.lightcomp.cz/aron/<line>/ — the 2.0 line at https://docs.lightcomp.cz/aron/2.0/, the development state at https://docs.lightcomp.cz/aron/main/. The edition is shown in the page title. Within a line, the Release notes chapter lists the changes of every build and marks those that need an administrator’s attention. Before an upgrade, read the changelog entries of every version between the installed one and the target one.