PowerPoint Presentation

Avalon Media System:Release 5.0 and BeyondDebs CaneNorthwestern University

Hydra Virtual Connect July 7, 2016

Avalon Media System is an open source software system, originally developed by the libraries at Indiana University and Northwestern University, for managing and providing online access to large collections of digital audio and video for purposes of teaching, learning and research. Avalon was initially released in 2013, and as of early 2016, there are at least six adopters of Avalon but no consistent pathway for adopters to contribute financial or development resources to the project.In 2015, we were awarded a grant from the Mellon Foundation to create a long-term sustainability plan that includes better integration with the Hydra community, a strategy to increase adoption, and a pilot of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering in addition to its current locally-installed model.This presentation will provide an outline of Avalons path forward and how it corresponds with directions of the Hydra and Fedora communities. We are radically changing our development strategy as we move forward, and we will discuss our strategic initiatives and outline new areas of exploration and development. Additionally, we will talk about the advantages and disadvantages we have seen in our partnership model and how we plan to evolve that model as we move forward with Avalons development.

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What is Avalon?Open source software system that enables libraries and archives to provide access to audio and video collections

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What is Avalon?Easily installable and configurableWorks on the Fedora/Hydra stackServes a variety of use cases and institutionsSustainable development

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Use CasesLearningConsortium Licensed Video Video Reserves in LMSResearchMedia within archival collections/exhibitsOnline publishing Collection ManagementArchival FilmMass Digitization

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Faceted browse via Blacklight

Desktop/Mobile Player

Navigation by Structure

Embedding

Manage Content

Add item: Web, Network Storage, API

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Descriptive Metadata: MODS

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Structural Metadata

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Avalon 5.0 June 13, 2016Organization and Sharing FeaturesCreate private or shareable PlaylistsAdd whole audio and video files or clips to playlists

Content Ingest APIA lightweight API for importing metadata and links to existing derivatives into Avalon.

Access control enhancementsIP based access controlDate digitized field for master files.Grant access permission for items for set periods of time

More granular searchingSearching now includes section and structure labelsDate digitized provided as admin facet

Accessibility phase 2Support for ingesting/delivering captions in VTT and/or SRT filesPlayer shows captions when availableEnd user can toggle captioning on/off via player control - mouse and keyboard.Final Fedora 3 Release

This release is our last Fedora 3 release. It will provide a path for folks to migrate off Variations to Avalon(~11 institutions run Variations). The two major points for this release will be providing an ingest method (IU is currently in the process of ingesting our variations content into our production Avalon, ~10,000 of ~30,000 are currently ingested) and the playlist feature. Variations users will be forced to abandon Variations at some point in the nearish future because the next release of OS X will remove Quicktime's support for certain functions Variations need. These features have been deprecated for some time, but Apple is just now officially removing them. There also is not a supported version of Quicktime for Windows 10. So bad news for Variations but good news for Avalon adoption13

Avalon 5.0Organization and Sharing FeaturesCreate private or shareable playlist

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Avalon 5.0Organization and Sharing FeaturesAdd whole audio and video filesor clips to playlists

Evviva15

Avalon 5.0Access control enhancements

Evviva16

Avalon as a SaaSCloud-deployment modelWorking to develop partnership with Infrastructure Based Service companiesInterested in sites willing to pilot

Gemification of Avalon Architecture Re-factoring Avalon code for paying off technical debtModules of core Avalon components Making Avalon components easier to install for other institutionsBuilding up from CurationConcerns/Hydra Works

Creating a Robust Open Development Community Using other open source projects as a guidePotential for Avalon Developers Conference to train and introduce code base to wider developer audienceIntroduction of community based sprints

Near Future for Avalon

Watching Hybox as they go through some of these same issues.

Release 7 (gemification) is too fuzzy at this point to discuss in detail.

The next two releases are primarily architecture/rearchitecture focused, they will have some features, such as exhibits via Spotlight, dropping flash, and implementing an embeddable LTI player, but those features are primarily related to the promises made in our Melon Grant. 17

Avalon 6.0 (Expected October 2016)UpgradesFedora 4, Hydra 9, Solr, Ruby upgradesNew data models for Fedora4JS media framework decisions

SAAS PreparationDevelop AWS infrastructure mapRunning AWS Hosted PilotPricing Models for SAAS

Additional transcode engine supportZencoder/amazon elastic transcode decisionRework AWS Instance when Matterhorn is removed

Easily Edit/Import Structural MetadataDocumentation & Transparency Move JIRA to Waffle/GithubServer mappingImprove manual install and upgrade instructionsFedora 4 upgrade path instructions Variations migration path instructionsCode style guide and standards

Improvements to Playlists

Contributions to IIIF Framework Enable codeclimate against a repo

We are not basing the next release on PCDM, instead were doing a direct port of our current models

Migrating from Fedora 3 to Fedora 4 Fedora 4 running with our current data model (so datastreams, etc). Ensure no features in Avalon become nonfunctional during the upgrade

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Avalon 7.0 (Expected Winter 2017)Exhibits Via Spotlight Spotlight integration and implementationHow-to Documentation

Strategy for QAStaffing and workflowIntegrated Automated Test environments

Remove RTMP SupportDrop FlashInvestigate HLS on all platforms and its implications Create one player view in Avalon Re-implement media element customization against the main branch Adjust streaming security model Move to standard mediaelement

Better internal permissions setup

Gemification/Break interdependenciesStreaming gem for another repo appBulk metadata/editing gem

Improve packagingCreate ansible solution and docker containers (internal only)Better developer install methodsBetter OVA

Structural Metadata Improvementsgranular seekingmove a master file to a different itemmerge/split items

We are not basing the next release on PCDM, instead were doing a direct port of our current models

Migrating from Fedora 3 to Fedora 4 Fedora 4 running with our current data model (so datastreams, etc). Ensure no features in Avalon become nonfunctional during the upgrade

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Questions?www.avalonmediasystem.orggithub.com/avalonmediasystem

deborah.cane@northwestern.edu

Sandbox you can try out via the website.

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