Avalon's Role in the Digital Collections Ecosystem Digital Collections Services Avalon's Role in the Digital Collections Ecosystem INDIANA UNIVERSITY

The Avalon Media System

What’s Avalon? The Avalon Media System is an open source system for managing and providing access to large collections of digital audio and video. The freely available system enables libraries and archives to easily curate, distribute and provide online access to their collections for purposes of teaching, learning and research.

Avalon is for Time-based Media Consuming time-based media is different than for images and documents Different sets of user expectations Different set of features than document-based repository systems like Sufia

Avalon is Grant Funded 2010 - IMLS National Leadership Grant 2011 – Second IMLS grant awarded 2015 – Grant from the Mellon Foundation for supporting development through 2017

What IS Avalon? A robust web application with many moving pieces—core application, transcoding service, SQL databases, and the Hydra stack A Hydra application

Hydra https://projecthydra.org/ A software framework for creating user-facing applications for the Fedora digital repository system Ruby on Rails, Blacklight, Solr, Fedora

A technical framework Community Design principles Hydra provides: A technical framework Community Design principles

Special Needs for Time-based Media Time-based media is tricky! Oodles of common formats for digital media Multiple streaming protocols to consider

Avalon is Different Designed for libraries and archives Meets a different set of needs than consumer platforms like YouTube and Vimeo

Avalon Features

Media Transcoding Avalon uses open source tools to convert media files Transcoding service allows us to track status Potential issues with formats or metadata are automatically resolved for ease of use

Permissions and Access Membership in directory groups IP Address Institutional Logins Time-based permissions—make items accessible only during specific time ranges

Embedding Content

Structural Metadata

Avalon at IU

Avalon Instances Media Collections Online Institute for Juvenile Court and Corrections Research Internal MDPI Content Access

Media Collections Online 30,000+ items Holds over 60 collections of digital media materials 20 academic and administrative units

Collections in MCO Cultural Anthropology Floyd County Oral History Project Moving Image Archive IUPUI University Library

IJCCR Restricted content available to Social Work students Designed for research

MDPI Internal Content Access Temporary home for materials digitized through MDPI Available for collection managers to browse digitized materials Customized for extra searching

What’s next?

HydraDAM2 Developed by IU Libraries and WGBH Funded by an NEH grant The preservation counterpart to Avalon

Variations Digital Music Library Software Avalon’s original name was “Variations on Video”! Content in Variations content has been migrated to Media Collections Online Future development will be done to meet the needs of Music faculty and staff

Thank you! avalonmediasystem.org Jon Cameron joncamer@indiana.edu avalon@iu.edu