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Avalon Update

Jon Cameron

Indiana University Libraries

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Samvera Midwest Regional Meetup 2024

Sep 25, 2024

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What is Avalon?

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

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Avalon Team

  • Project Director: Jon Dunn
  • Product Owner: Jon Cameron
  • Scrum Master: Emily Lynema
  • Developers: Mason Ballengee & Mason Ballengee
  • DevOps: Chris Colvard
  • Metadata Specialist: Julie Hardesty

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Avalon Community

  • Many other institutions using Avalon
    • https://www.avalonmediasystem.org/implementers
  • In-progress Implementations
    • Michigan State University
  • Monthly Roundtable Meeting
  • Public Slack Channel

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Recent Releases

Avalon 7.8!

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(also 2024)�Avalon 7.7

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Avalon 7.7.1

Avalon 7.7.2

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Avalon Media System 7.8 – August 2024

  • Avalon 7.8 includes a new component for searching transcripts within the transcript viewer, dependency upgrades, and a variety of bug fixes and minor improvements
  • Ramp 3.2
    • A library of interactive, IIIF-powered React components for audio and moving image presentation
    • https://github.com/samvera-labs/ramp

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New Indexing

    • "Found in" text now appears in search results
      • indicates the number of matches for separate parts of the record: descriptive metadata, section metadata and transcript text
    • Transcript text is fully indexed for use in the Transcript component’s new search within feature
    • Many thanks to contributors at Third Wave for providing the core of the transcript search functionality

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Transcript Component – Search Within

MediaPlayer

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IIIF Content Search API

MediaPlayer

"service": [

{

"type": "SearchService2",

"id": "https://avalon-dev.dlib.indiana.edu/master_files/ng451h49f/search"

}

]

https://avalon-dev.dlib.indiana.edu/master_files/ng451h49f�/search?q=Mr. Bungle

"@context": "http://iiif.io/api/search/2/context.json",

"id": "https://avalon-dev.dlib.indiana.edu/master_files/ng451h49f/search?q=Mr%20Bungle",

"type": "AnnotationPage",

"items": [

{

"id": "https://avalon-dev.dlib.indiana.edu/media_objects/fj236208t/manifest/canvas/ng451h49f/search/80d3132a-dbcb-4a21-9b36-877e0127ca94",

"type": "Annotation",

"motivation": "supplementing",

"body": {

"type": "TextualBody",

"value": "In the puppet show, <em>Mr</em>. <em>Bungle</em> came to the boys' room on his way to lunch.",

"format": "text/plain"

},

"target": https://avalon-dev.dlib.indiana.edu/master_files/ng451h49f/supplemental_files/309/transcripts#t=00:00:36.100,00:00:41.300 …

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API Updates

MediaPlayer

  • Supplemental files can now be created, queried and uploaded via API
  • Allows for mass upload and update of captions, transcripts, text documents etc.
  • Future work
    • More functionality
    • Better responses for �unsuccessful requests
    • OpenAPI or other standard?

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7.8 Continued

  • Caption files can be typed as transcript documents for double duty—displaying as captions in the media player display as well as a document for viewing and navigation in the Transcript component

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  • Language field now available for Transcript files
  • Caption and Transcript files can now be uploaded via spreadsheet-based batch ingest

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7.8 Continued

  • Playback rate control: media playback speed can be decreased or increased with a widget in the media player

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  • IIIF manifest URL added to the Share panel

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Even More 7.8

  • New configuration added to provide a link for direct download of derivatives through the UI
  • Embedded media player now uses Ramp
  • New recordChangeDate field to track the last change to descriptive metadata
  • "Has Transcript" and "Has Caption" facets moved to the admin facet listing
  • File size limit for web upload changed to remove the 2 GB default
  • Added setting for configuring alternative Rack tempfile location
  • Bibliographic ID value added to the search index for instances where import is not performed

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Some Notable Bugs We Fixed ☹

  • Playlist description display fixed
  • Limit the number of stream tokens in a user session to avoid session overflow errors
  • Timecode values in the Timeliner tool display properly for media longer than 60 minutes
  • Poster and thumbnail images are no set to improper aspect ratios for certain video container files
  • Added handling for media whose ratio is defined in metadata and was not reported by mediainfo
  • SRT Parsing Fix

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What’s Next

Avalon 8.0 – November 2024

  • Fedora 6
  • Performance improvements
  • Rails 7.2 / Ruby 3.3 upgrade
  • Ramp state management improvement
  • Ability to serve streaming files via progressive download (i.e. MP3)
  • Microsoft cloud storage support for Browse Everything (OneDrive, Sharepoint)

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What’s Next

  • AVAnnotate Mellon grant – working with UT Austin to improve IIIF Annotation support in Ramp
  • Website migration: moving avalonmediasystem.org to the new Samvera template and Contentful CMS

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Get in Touch with the Avalon Team

  • #avalon channel in Samvera Slack
  • avalon-discuss-l@iu.edu list
  • more at avalonmediasystem.org/connect
  • Try out Avalon 7.8 at demo.avalonmediasystem.org

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Thank You!

avalonmediasystem.org