Evaluation & Implementation

Avalon is seeking your input to help us create Avalon Media System specific training.

You can tell us what areas would be of the most use for your team when it comes to training, and what works best for you in terms of delivery.  

Just fill out this brief survey to give us some ideas.  The survey should only take about 5-10 minutes to complete, and if you have additional ideas for what we could offer, we're all ears.

The following is a guest post by Tomasz Neugebauer of Concordia University.

We are pleased to announce that the libraries of Northwestern University and Indiana University have been awarded a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to support continued work on Avalon as part of a project titled Avalon Media System: Integrating audiovisual collections with research, digital preservation, and a sustainable developer community.

One of the major goals of the current phase of Avalon, supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is evolving Avalon to include a hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) option in order to help grow the Avalon user base.

The Avalon team is excited to announce 3 recent steps made towards cloud-based, hosted solutions:

1)   The Avalon team has successfully completed a number of necessary upgrades towards cloud based services.

Announcing Avalon 5.0

Indiana University and Northwestern University are pleased to announce Avalon Media System 5.0.

Release 5.0 adds the following capabilities:

·      Organization and Sharing Features

o   Create private or shareable Playlists

o   Add whole audio and video files or clips to playlists

·      Content Ingest API

o   A lightweight API for importing metadata and links to existing derivatives into Avalon.

We've been working on a proof of concept for Fedora 3 to Fedora 4. 

Many of our partners and potential partners who are interested in running Avalon need to start with a decision about their streaming server.We've heard from many of you that are currently a Wowza shop, and you report that it has worked really well for you, and are thus inclined to stay with Wowza.  Now we can announce that during this last sprint, our developers have made Avalon compatible!

Tricia Patterson, the National Digital Stewardship Resident at MIT Libraries is helping evaluate Avalon for MIT's Lewis Music Library. Learn about the team's process and the requirements they have established for media management systems.

Originally posted on SIPs, DIPs, & bytes: NDSR Boston's Digital Preservation Test Kitchen: