Avalon on the Road! Samvera Connect 2018 and DLF Forum 2018

Oct 26, 2018

In October 2018, Avalon Media System team members attended two conferences - Samvera Connect 2018 in Salt Lake City and Digital Library Federation Forum 2018 in Las Vegas.

Samvera Connect 2018

Each year, Samvera Connect provides the Samvera Community with 3 days of conference and a day of workshops to help coordinate and drive the Samvera technologies and communities forward. This year the event was held at the University of Utah's Marriott Library.

Marriott Library at the University of Utah. Giant letters spell out "IMAGINE U"

Members of the Indiana and Northwestern University teams attended workshops on Tuesday October 9th. Community Tech Lead Chris Colvard and developer Brian Keese (both from Indiana) led a workshop on this day entitled "Enhanced media playback in a Hyrax app using Avalon components". The session was well attended, and provided food for thought for Avalon users and other Samvera community members considering time based media in their Samvera installations.

Chris Colvard leads a training session at the Marriott Library at Utah

Other events related to Avalon (abstracts from the conference)

Wednesday – Plenary

Avalon Update - Jon Dunn (Northwestern), Carolyn Caizzi & Ryan Steans (Northwestern)

Description: Avalon will demonstrate how an initial plan to re-architect Avalon Media System utilizing the Hyrax stack has paired with efforts to ensure greater sustainability of both Avalon and Samvera as framework and community. Following that goal, the past year the Avalon team has made terrific strides toward the development of Avalon 7, in part through community collaborative work with Hyrax and Samvera teams. Additionally, we'll cover work aimed at preservation and scaled hosting of Avalon, as well as a range of activities including IIIF development for audiovisual media, collaborations with Avalon users, new features such as OHMS integration, our participation in community interest and working groups, and our efforts at outreach to find and assist new and potential users.

Wednesday - Poster Session

Avalon 7 Roadmap – Development to Sustainability - Maria Whitaker (Indiana) and Ryan Steans (Northwestern)

Thursday – Avalon Related Sessions

My Life in Ops: Docker, Terraform, AWS, and Learning As We Go - Michael B. Klein, David Schober (Northwestern)

Over the past two years, Northwestern University Libraries has moved its repository infrastructure and applications to Amazon Web Services. Our initial solution, presented at Samvera Connect 2017, involved AWS CloudFormation, several different deployment platforms, and a lot of manual intervention. In our second phase, we have adopted a fully automated build/configure/deploy system to stand up Fedora, Solr, PostgreSQL, Redis, a Cantaloupe IIIF server, an Avalon Media System instance, a secure CloudFront streaming media distribution, and two Hyrax applications using Terraform, Docker, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and a whole bunch of homegrown tools and hacks. This presentation will provide an overview of our current system, and hopefully jumpstart some discussions of how these tools can be adopted, standardized, and reused among other members of the Samvera community.

Avalon and IIIF for Audio and Video - Chris Colvard, Brian Keese, Maria Whitaker (Indiana) Adam Arling (Northwestern)

For the past year, Avalon Media System has worked alongside members of the IIIF Community to co-develop the specifications for IIIF Presentation API version 3. This version moves beyond the two-dimensional image plane to include audio and video within the scope of media which can utilize IIIF to describe and manage content for use and re-use both with Avalon and by any viewer capable of presenting an object with a IIIF manifest. Avalon is excited about the possibilities for incorporating shareable structural metadata, as well as the ability to incorporate metadata along the timeline of time-based media. We will provide an overview of IIIF and the application of IIIF to AV content, including structural metadata and other features derived from the IIIF API.

Avalon's Audiovisual Work Type: Incorporating Metadata Changes for Hyrax - Jen Young (Northwestern)

Avalon has developed an audiovisual work type that will be available for use in Hyrax. This work type will keep all descriptive metadata fields currently available for Avalon and include the use of rightsstatements.org declarations. This presentation will discuss moving from a MODSXML-based work type to a RDF based work type and how that will impact other activities in Avalon such as batch ingest.

UI JavaScript Component Architecture for Consistency and Reusability - Adam Arling (Northwestern)

An overview of modern front-end UI component architecture and patterns. Will showcase case studies in development and implementation decisions in Avalon Media System (platform: Hyrax/Webpacker/React) and Northwestern University's Digital Collections application (platform: React/Redux application built on top of Hyrax in AWS). Will make a case for why UI component architecture is important in community-driven, open-source development, how it can directly benefit the Samvera community moving forward.

Case Studies in Samvera Integration Approaches with OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer) - Jon Cameron (Indiana) Ben Armintor (Columbia)

A discussion of different approaches to integrating the standard tools or approaches of a digital scholarship community (the OHMS tool developed by the Nunn Center at University of Kentucky) with existing Samvera digital repository management & publication systems developed by Indiana and Columbia Universities. Presentations will also touch on data serialization, APIs, and external/new developer teams as integration considerations.

Samvera and IIIF: Opportunities and Challenges - Jon Dunn (Indiana), Hannah Frost (Stanford), Simeon Warner (Cornell), Adam Wead (Penn State)

Adoption of IIIF within the Samvera community has been growing steadily and with the release of Hyrax 2.1, it will be growing faster. At the same time the IIIF community has grown larger, more distributed, and with use cases that extend beyond the Samvera community. How has IIIF adoption provided opportunities for richer user experiences within your Samvera app or new services altogether? How has IIIF led to rethinking your services and architecture and the role of Samvera within them? How can the Samvera and IIIF community, or IIIF users within the Samvera community, best collaborate?

Building on Hyrax and Avalon for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting - Sadie Roosa, Drew Meyer (WGBH)

This presentation will provide an overview of the needs of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, challenges and successes of building a custom application based on Hyrax and Avalon, features developed both within the application and as re-usable components, and how to represent PBCore metadata in a Samvera application.

DLF Forum 2018

From Salt Lake City, some of our team drove down to Las Vegas while some who couldn't be at Connect flew in to Nevada. DLF Forum is annual conference addressing general digital library concerns and innovations, both technological and coultural. This year it took place south of Las Vegas as the M Resort from October 15th - 17th

We met with colleagues from across the country, represented Avalon and Samvera at a sponsor table (thanks to Utah University) and co-presented with Lyrasis and Artefactual.

Avalon Media System - Developing Toward Sustainability and Community - Jon Cameron (Indiana), Ryan Steans (Northwestern), Carissa Egan (Lyrasis), Ashley Blewer (Artefactual)

This panel will focus on Avalon Media System's work toward Collaborative development, preservation workflow integration, and a recent SaaS pilot. Artefactual, a recognized leader in digital preservation, Lyrasis, an innovative digital libraries services provider, and Avalon Media System team members will provide a status report of our progress.

And, as the event was in Vegas, we made sure we talked shop while walking the strip with our colleagues.