Avalon Update

Jon Cameron

Indiana University Libraries

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Samvera Connect 2025

Oct 28, 2025

What is Avalon Media System?

• Streaming audio and video access platform designed for libraries and archives
• Flexible and granular access control
• Easy transcoding workflows
• Supported by grants from the Mellon Foundation and IMLS

Ramp: IIIF Media Component Library

MediaPlayer

• Ramp is a library of interactive components that render audio and video resources from IIIF Presentation 3.0 manifests
• Ramp Components:
• Video.js-based media player
• Descriptive metadata display
• Transcript viewer
• Structure display and track navigation
• Supplemental file listing (view/download)
• Annotations Display
• Reads IIIF Presentation 3 manifests and populates components based on manifest contents and Ramp initialization parameters
• Goals: Lightweight, AV-focused, accessible, and satisfies a broad set of use cases for Avalon and others

Avalon and IIIF

• IIIF APIs Implemented
• Presentation 3.0 – manifests available for all media objects
• Authentication 1.0 – authentication service on restricted access objects
• Content Search 2.0 – used for searching within transcript documents
• Software within Avalon using IIIF
• Ramp – media component library. Reads the manifest for an object and populates and initializes the media player, descriptive metadata display, transcript viewer, and other components as configured
• Structural Metadata Editor – works natively with IIIF manifests as a data structure and data interchange with Avalon’s XML structure format
• Timeliner – stores and renders using IIIF manifests as the primary data document and structure; used for annotating media with bubble diagrams

Recent Avalon Media System Releases

Avalon 8.0 December 2024

Support for Fedora 6, improved UI/UX and browser support in Ramp, support for Microsoft cloud storage, bug fixes and improvements

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Avalon 8.0.1 May 2025

Bug fixes and improvement to item load times

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Avalon 8.1 August 2025

Support for Rails 8 and other major dependencies, numerous updates and bugfixes

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Avalon 8.1.1 September 25

Bug fix release for 8.1

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Avalon Media System 8.0

Dependency Upgrades

• Fedora 6 🎉
• Rails 7.2
• Ruby 3.3

Features

• Sharepoint added as a source in Browse Everything
• Stream MP3 files directly without transcoding
• Date is no longer a required field in descriptive metadata
• Subject field now links out to faceted Blacklight catalog view

Avalon 8 Performance Improvements

• Solr queries updated to improve response times
• Performance improvements to item edit pages and HLS streaming manifest generation
• Load time values tracked during development and testing
• 8.0.1: Further Solr query changes for item pages
• 3x speed increase for loading objects with 100 child sections (files)

Avalon Media System 8.0.1

Bug Fixes

• Fixed timing scope bugs for Add to Playlist and Create Timeline actions
• Resolved a case where the Share panel would not be enabled on item pages
• Files retrieved from cloud storage respect masterfile management settings and no longer have redundant download requests
• Connecting to Sharepoint in Browse Everything no longer requires two authentication attempts
• User account fields are no longer case sensitive
• Streaming server configuration in settings file respects both string and token values

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Avalon Media System 8.1

Dependency Upgrades

• Rails 8
• Blacklight 8 (Bootstrap 5)
• Ruby 3.4
• Ramp 4

Features

• Increased automated test coverage
• Filter text fields available on Blacklight modals with many values
• New setting added to create dynamic links to accessibility request forms
• Increased WCAG 2.1 Compliance across the application
• Improved response speed for edit pages
• Supplemental file links can now open inline and defer to browser configuration for file handling

Avalon 8.1 Continued

Avalon 8.1 Metadata field and import changes

• "Alternative Title" added as a descriptive metadata field
• "Instruments" added to Note Type vocabulary
• MARC 382 fields import as an "Instruments" Note
• MARC 490/8xx and 730 fields now import to the Series field
• Alternative titles appear in Blacklight search results

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Avalon 8.1.1

Bug Fixes and Changes

• Fixed a bug that caused metadata for supplemental files to not save properly
• Fixed typeahead form fields where styling and functionality were broken due to extra elements
• A valid and empty response is now provided when no parameters are provided to the IIIF Content Search service instead of a 500 error

Ramp Releases

MediaPlayer

Ramp 3.3

• Progress bar style changes for improved seeking
• State management refactored
• Captions settings for user sessions now saved in the browser
• Expand/collapse buttons for structural metadata moved from Avalon to a new Ramp component

Ramp 4.x

• Increased support for nested structure
• MarkersDisplay component renamed to Annotations
• More support for annotations in IIIF manifests
• Ability to limit playback to certain segments of a media stream

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Ramp 3.4 - Annotations Component

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Ramp 3.4 - Annotations Component

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What’s Next

Avalon 8.2

• Asset Pipeline Updates
• Support for Audio Description
• Unit Objects for Management and Permission Inheritance
• Workflows for accessibility requirements
• Increased WCAG 2.1 AA compliance
• Improved Analytics Tool Support
• Ramp: Updated build process and upgrade to React 19

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Avalon Community

• Many institutions using Avalon
• https://avalon.samvera.org/features#implementations
• In-progress implementation: Michigan State University
• Monthly Roundtable Meeting
• https://samvera.atlassian.net/wiki/x/KwK0d
• Public Slack Channel
• #avalon in Samvera Slack

Get in Touch with the Avalon Team

• #avalon channel in Samvera Slack
• avalon.samvera.org/contact
• avalon-discuss-l@iu.edu Mailing List
• Try Avalon out at demo.avalonmediasystem.org

Thank You!

avalonmediasystem.org