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Avalon Update

Jon Cameron

Indiana University Libraries

Samvera Connect 2025

Oct 28, 2025

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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

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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

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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

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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

Avalon 8.0.1 May 2025

Bug fixes and improvement to item load times

Avalon 8.1 August 2025

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

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

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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)

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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

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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

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

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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

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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

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Thank You!

avalonmediasystem.org