Development Updates

Back from the holiday break, we began work on our next release, 3.3. We added the capability of importing descriptive metadata from an OPAC by specifying a catalog ID on the Resource Description page. We also added the capability of ingesting multiple quality levels of pre-transcoded derivatives via the batch ingest process. Previously, batch ingest could only add one quality level of pre-transcoded derivative. We also fixed two 3.2 release bugs we discovered. A patch for one is available and the second will shortly be available.
 

We had another four-week sprint due to the holiday season. In this sprint we squashed a few last minute bugs and we spent some time upgrading our demo server and our local systems to the latest release 3.2, which was announced during the last sprint. We also started work on new and exciting features for our next release including importing bibliographic information from an external system. 

We are delighted to announce Avalon Media System 3.2, completed and released on December 19, 2014. As part of a series of minor 3.0 releases, Avalon 3.2 provides support for important content management efficiencies and other improvements.

Release 3.2 adds the following capabilities:

This was a four-week sprint due to the Thanksgiving holidays. In addition to fixing many bugs in preparation for the 3.2 release, we also added support for bulk change of access control settings. Beyond those activities, the majority of the work went into troubleshooting the 3.2 upgrade process.

The 3.2 release is imminently expected toward the beginning of our next sprint, which will also be four weeks in length. Look for a 3.2 announcement shortly!

During this sprint we added additional fields to our resource description form based on feedback from our users and we hope they are useful to you as well. These fields include:

• Language
• Original Physical Description
• Related Item
• Terms of Use

At the very beginning of the sprint, IU's general Avalon instance successfully moved to production. We have started enhancing the metadata by providing a repeatable field to hold other system identifiers such as bib numbers, and we provided a way to facet and display using creation date (if available) not just publication date. We fixed a problem with ID specification for LTI access.

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 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.

Sprint 59 saw further progress towards implementing the Avalon Media System at Indiana University. During this sprint we focused infrastructure matters such as restart documentation and notifications for monitoring alerts. We also started a series of video playback tests with the goal of ensuring the best possible playback quality in low bandwidth scenarios. Testing for mobile and desktop environments will be completed using a variety of low, medium, and high bitrate options in addition to the current Avalon settings.

After completing Avalon’s upgrades to Hydra 7.1 and the latest versions of Blacklight, Ruby on Rails, and Bootstrap, the developers have dedicated this month to functionality and styling. As a part of this work, over 2,000 lines of code were changed to make Avalon more robust for future Blacklight upgrades. Some of the new perks include better responsive design performance and the ability to delete facet selections directly from the facet menu.