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

2. The Avalon Media System

3. 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.

4. 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

5. 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

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

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

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

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

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

11. Avalon Features

12. 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

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

14. Embedding Content

15. Structural Metadata

16. Avalon at IU

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

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

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

20. IJCCR Restricted content available to Social Work students
Designed for research

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

22. What’s next?

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

24. 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

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