2013 in Review

2013 was a busy year for the Avalon Media System team, but we definitely had fun! Our proudest accomplishments of the year were releasing version 1.0 and 2.0 of the Avalon Media System.

Release 1.0 (May 2013) introduced a lot of the baseline functionality of the software, including support for both Adobe Media Server and the Red5 open source media server for audio and video streaming; integration possibilities for a variety of authentication systems, along with permissions management by user- or group-based authorization; and manual media ingest and description and a dropbox-based batch import capability.

Release 2.0 (October 2013) included a new hierarchical permissions model; default access controls for collections which could be more easily be shared with defined groups; a new, more usable media player; and the ability to create custom thumbnails for video content by taking a "snapshot" during playback or by specifying a timepoint. This is our current release, so don’t forget to download or try it out today!

Beyond our releases, here’s a quick recap of what we worked on this past year, complete with links in case you want to learn more about a particular presentation or event.

In January, Jon Dunn and Adam Hallett gave a presentation about Avalon at the Opencast Unconference.

In February, Julie Rudder presented the poster "Avalon Media System: A Collaboratively Developed Video and Audio Content Management and Delivery Solution" at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Annual Meeting. Michael B. Klein and Nathan Rogers also presented “The Avalon Media System: A Next-Generation Hydra Head for Audio and Video Delivery” at Code4Lib 2013.

In March, Jon Dunn and Mark Notess gave a talk and demo of the Avalon Media System as part of the Indiana University Digital Library Brown Bag series.

In April, Jon Dunn and Claire Stewart presented "The Avalon Media System: An Open Source Audio/Video System for Libraries and Archives" at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Membership Meeting. Stu Baker and Stefan Elnabli gave a presentation at a meeting hosted by the Media Preservation Initiative in Bloomington, Indiana. Jon Dunn gave a lightning talk at CURATECamp AVpres as well.

In May, we celebrated Release 1.0 by donning fancy celebratory gear!

In July, Claire Stewart participated in a panel discussion titled, “Repository solutions for time-based media” at Open Repositories 2013. Jon Dunn presented the poster “The Avalon Media System: A Platform for Access-Controlled Delivery of Time-Based Media” at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. We also welcomed Leah Lee to the Avalon team as a new Programmer/Analyst.

In August, Stefan Elnabli presented a poster about Avalon at the Archives 2013 conference.

In October, we held the Avalon Partners Meeting in Bloomington, Indiana. Later in the month, we announced Release 2.0, our most current release of the software.

In November, Jon Dunn and Andrea Zielke presented a poster about Avalon at the 2013 DLF Forum. Stefan Elnabli also presented a poster at AMIA 2013.

In December, we welcomed Cynthia Ramlo to the Avalon team as Lead User Experience Designer.

Over the course of 2013 the team worked through 10 presentations at national and international conferences, 25 sprints, and two releases of the software. We can’t wait to see what 2014 has in store for us!