Avalon Partnership Update

 

 

 

 

Community colleagues,

 

After 9 years, thousands of standup meetings, copious emails and Slack messages, hundreds of thousands of lines of code, countless updates, and 6 (soon to be 7) major releases, Northwestern University Libraries will be stepping back from its formal partnership with Indiana University Libraries as co-developer of Avalon Media System as of early 2020 which will coincide with the planned full release of Avalon 7.  

 

Over the last 4 years, Northwestern and Indiana have been working on making Avalon a more flexible system that would allow for greater external development – moving the project from being owned entirely by two institutions to being supported by a larger community. With our most recent IMLS grant, Chris Colvard and Ryan Steans have made tremendous inroads into the Samvera community and have built out development and user partnerships that indicate the maturity of our products and relationships.

 

Northwestern will not be walking away from Avalon or our community. Northwestern is committed to the Samvera and Avalon community and will continue to work on shared sprints and will continue to run Avalon locally. Once Avalon 7 launches, however, Indiana University will take over institutional ownership of the product. The Indiana University Libraries remain committed to developing and supporting Avalon going forward, with continued commitment of developers, product owner, and subject matter experts working on Avalon, in concert with contributions from others in the Avalon and Samvera communities.

 

On behalf of all of us on the Avalon team: it has been a tremendous opportunity to work on this project together. Having the ability to work with a tightly integrated team across institutional borders has been exciting, illuminating, occasionally frustrating, but ultimately exceedingly rewarding. All of us have valued the relationships and opportunities that have come from this collaboration, and we look forward to continuing to work together, in a slightly different form, moving forward. 

 

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out. We’re happy to chat. 

 

Evviva Weinraub & Jon Dunn

Co-Project Directors – Avalon Media System