October 2014

This sprint was an uncharacteristic 4 weeks in length, due to the presence of much of the team at Hydra Connect 2 during the sprint. The main work completed is the ability for staff to select multiple items and then publish, unpublish or delete them, or to assign them to a different collection. In addition, we decided on and implemented new default transcoding profile for video. We cut the bitrates in half, which should help with performance on slow wireless networks while still preserving good quality for the high quality derivative.

The Avalon Media System is now in production at Indiana University. With this achievement, the development team members, based at both Indiana University and Northwestern University, are celebrating the successful implementation of Avalon at both project partner institutions. At Indiana University, Avalon is presented as Media Collections Online, integrating the signature Indiana Univeristy colors and branding bars.

The main goals of this sprint were to fix user interface issues and get our institutional production systems in place and ready for use. We completed the user interface issues that were a result of the recent upgrades to Hydra, Blacklight and Bootstrap. You may see a few differences in styling with version 3.2 because we made some decisions to stay closer to defaults than we had in previous releases. Our own institutions are ramping up production use of Avalon. Northwestern made a few quick changes to improve notifications and workflow issues for our staff.