Development Updates

Supported Platforms and Browsers

Avalon is supported by several platforms including: Windows 7-10; Mac OS X 10.8-10.10 (Lion, Mavericks, and Yosemite); iOs 5.1-89; and Android 4.1-5.0. On Android, Avalon supports the Chrome browser on devices running Jelly Bean 4.1 or higher. 

 

New Accessibility Features

As we develop Avalon further, we aim to reframe accessibility in terms of what we can provide our users, rather than discussing what people lack. To that end, some of the features of the newest release of Avalon expand the usability of our software.

 

In the interest of clarity for multilingual users and people who use screen readers, each page now has better facet labels and titles. For example:

Avalon 4.0.1 Now Available

Avalon 4.0 Will Support Wowza

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!

 

Development Goals: APIs

Earlier this year the Avalon Media System received a generous grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This grant allows for the continued development of Avalon over the next two years, through January 2017. But what are the development plans and goals during this time?

Sprint 72 Update

During this sprint we continued our work on structural metadata support by implementing a means of uploading structure information in an XML file, whether via the interactive interface or via batch upload. We fixed a timeout problem where the interaction was confusing when the playback session timed out. And we did the metadata and design work necessary for adding new fields to hold imported notes and system IDs from MARC records. We made progress on integrating oEmbed for the player page, which will eventually allow us to support Facebook embeddability.

Sprint 71 Update

During sprint 71, we made a number of improvements, fixed several bugs, updated Wiki pages, and upgraded some production servers to Avalon 3.3. We made our first step towards structural metadata, implementing a means of navigating the media player by clicking on structure labels (could be tracks in an audio recording, or scenes in a play or opera, for example).

Sprints 68-70 update

During sprints 68 and 69 we put the final touches on release 3.3. That work included testing and fixing bugs, writing release documentation and upgrading our local systems. We also had an in-person team meeting during sprint 69 where we started on some major system work including updating our Blacklight and Hydra versions.
 
In sprint 70 we continued our work on Hydra 8 and upgrading to the newest Blacklight. The team also started investigating what it would take to make Avalon work with Fedora 4.

Avalon 3.3 Now Available

Indiana University and Northwestern University are pleased to announce Avalon Media System 3.3. Release 3.3 adds the following capabilities:

Sprint 57 – February 6, 2015

With this sprint, the Avalon team completed work on one of the main new features of Release 3.3: importing descriptive metadata from an online public access library catalog (OPAC) into Avalon. This may be accomplish via batch ingest by using a bibliographic record identification number. The metadata import functionality will be configurable to meet local cataloging practices and currently includes catalog key, Online Computer Library Catalog (OCLC), and Library of Congress Control Numbers (LCCN) identifier types as options.

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