Avalon Embedded

Media managed through Avalon can be shared in many places. Embedding the Avalon player in Omeka pages or webpages are two great ways to extend the reach of publicly accessible content. 

Omeka

The IU Moving Image Archive (IU MIA) exhibit, World War II Propaganda Films and IU: Audiovisual Production, Circulation, and Education, combines the advantages of two open source technologies. Omeka provides the IU MIA with a superb exhibit interface and the ability to classify films by subject. Avalon provides media management capabilities and enduring access to these films. After setting up the Omeka site and transcoding their media into Avalon, IU Moving Image Archive staff installed the Omeka plugin for Avalon. The plugin was created by IU Library Technologies’ Will Cowan. With a one-time addition of a line of PHP code, the plugin generates the Avalon media player embedded in an iframe. IU MIA staff simply copied the PURLs of the films from Avalon into the plugin menu of the Omeka pages. The plugin also works for audio items and the player’s dimensions may be easily reduced. The installation file and instructions are available on Will Cowan’s GitHub page.

Websites

Content in Avalon can spice up library outreach blogs or be shared by users on their own blogs and websites. An iframe embed link is included with every item in Avalon. Located directly beneath the player, the link may be copied and pasted into the code of any webpage. 

Next steps

Sharing media itself is useful, but it is also important to provide contextual information. The Avalon team recently added a button for the embedded player that brings users back to a media item’s original page in Avalon. This gives users the option to learn about the item and continue exploring your collections. Look for this feature in our upcoming release, Avalon 3.2.

Screenshot of the embedded Avalon Media System player with new the “i” link back button