Software

As Release 2.0 is nearing, the Avalon team has been working to include a few new features as well as refining the player. Upgrading to Hydra head 6.0 fixed a number of bugs that kept on popping up. The developers continued to work on incorporating features into the collection/unit workflow and now collections can be deleted and units can be browsed. We were able to do some testing and bug fixing on the mediaelement.js player which looks good and behaves in a more predictable manner. Avalon is maturing before our very eyes!

The second release of Avalon will have collections-based roles and permissions. This post describes what we've designed in hopes of getting your comments. Does this make sense? Is it easy to see how you would map these to your organization?

Units, Collections and Items

First, some definitions.

A unit is a grouping of collections. Usually, a unit will map to an administrative unit.

This week, the Avalon team spent a lot of time thinking about how to create collections without calling them collections! The team was able to almost complete backend modeling and testing; user interface will be the focus for the next sprint. Work was also completed on the crosswalk from the MODS fields that will be included in Avalon to MARC.  

We have a few team members up in Canada for Open Repositories 2013, so if you have any questions or want a quick demo just look for Jon Dunn, Claire Stewart or Adam Hallett!

After last week's venture into exploring administrative units, this week the team focused on how collections can be employed by Avalon.  Administrative units can now create and manage collections of items. This will be an easy way for collection managers to add content to a specific collection, and our metadata specialists spent a lot of time thinking of how those relationships would be captured in each MODS record. We are also happy to report that both IU and NU's pilot systems are up and running! 

This week the team worked on adding new functionality to Avalon. We introduced the concept of units to Avalon Media System. The term "unit" refers to an Administrative Unit, which can be made up of many collections and items. We also added some snazzy auto complete features to select unit managers. Besides units, more investigation of the mediaelement.js player occurred during this sprint. IU and NU spent some time getting their pilot systems set up. We're just about ready to see what Avalon 1.0 can really do! 

After releasing Avalon 1.0, the team spent some time cleaning up our code and investigating some future changes to Avalon, including looking at alternative player options and other ways to handle group management. If you have any feedback about what functionality you want to see in future releases, please join us at next week's webinar!

To receive connection information for the webinar, please fill out our registration form: http://tinyurl.com/avalon1-0

Throughout the process of working toward release 1.0, developing effective documentation was just as important to the team as developing effective code. The Collection Manager's Guide describes features, functionality, and how to navigate the Avalon Media System.