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The following is a guest post by Tomasz Neugebauer of Concordia University.

In early December 2016, the participants of the Literary Audio Symposium at Concordia University explored the literary historical study, digital development, and critical and pedagogical engagement with collections of spoken recordings. Many recordings are already accessible online through repositories such as PennSound and the Cylinder Archive Project, but the potential benefits of collaborative and coordinated development of digitized spoken-audio archives for scholars, teachers and the public are only beginning to be realized.

Jared Wiercinski, Tim Walsh, and Tomasz Neugebauer gave a presentation about digital preservation and access with Avalon and Archivematica at the symposium. Concordia Library’s interest in digital preservation and access to audio/video collections was primarily inspired by an ongoing discussion with Concordia’s Center for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. COHDS developed a custom software solution in 2010 called Stories Matter for managing audio/visual oral history data, but the software had faced challenges with sustainability of development, insufficient digital preservation functionality, and lack of integration with a web browser. A summary of that presentation is provided below.

We began our needs analysis for supporting audio/visual research collections by looking to support the functionality developed in Stories Matter, including:

• The ability to manage the structure of oral history metadata, which is divided into projects, interviewees, sessions, and clips
• Providing for item level permission levels for access
• Attaching transcripts, additional documents, and interviewer observations
• Save/edit/browse playlists

We also desired a specialized research workflow functionality for interoperability within the library platform. For example, it should be possible to extract the data from the repository using formats to be ingested into research tools that can generate tag clouds and network visualizations of the data.

In an ideal world, digital preservation and access for all formats would be accomplished within the same system, but in reality, different access systems exist for target formats and audiences. Avalon Media System is designed to provide access to large collections of digital audio and video, alongside a community of educational, media, and open technology institutions. As audio/video collections are of interest to Concordia Library, Avalon is highly appealing, but it also presents a challenge, as we also need to provide access to text and image objects. Ensuring the enduring usability, authenticity, and discoverability of these materials requires a dedicated digital preservation system supporting a wide range of document types. Archivematica was selected as the open source digital preservation solution that will be used for preservation planning, identification, characterization, and migration tasks.

Our rationale for selecting Avalon as a top choice centers on our need of a system for qualitative research data in audio/video format. The strengths of Avalon include its evolution out of the successful Variations Digital Music Library project from Indiana University Bloomington, and its strong development community with a proven record of feature-packed releases. The key features of Avalon that make it a top choice for an access system include:

• Hierarchical structure of objects, with units, collections, items, sections, and time-stamped start and end points
• Sophisticated access and permission controls at collection and item level
• Robust metadata and faceted discovery
• Playlists including items and sections, public or private
• Captions and subtitles
• Integration with HydraDam2 and the Spotlight exhibition tool

Additionally, while Avalon’s excellent support for video is a key requirement for oral history, the fact that Avalon acknowledges audio as a distinct format with unique requirements is important for spoken word content and other audio types. Audio research data is important for scholarly research in many disciplines; Mark R. Roosa’s (2015) “Sound and Audio Archives” ( In M. V. Cloonan (Ed.), Preserving our heritage: perspectives from antiquity to the digital age (pp. 278-287). London: Facet Publishing.) lists multiple audio types such as Linguistic, Folklore, Oral history, Ethnographic, Dialectic, Music, Ethnomusicology, Bioacoustics, and Spoken word (p. 279). Although commercial tools like Soundcloud and Spotify offer robust functionality, there is a large gap left from these tools concerning how audio is utilized in institutional repositories. Avalon helps to fill this functionality.

The fact that an upcoming version of Avalon will integrate the Spotlight exhibition tool developed at Stanford University is particularly promising. Spotlight extends the repository ecosystem by providing a means for reusing digital content in other scholarly websites, allowing for the possibility of pulling content out of Avalon and into new research contexts.

Our concerns for Avalon, in addition to its limited capabilities for non-audio/video documents, include its composition of a complex set of software components that can be difficult to install and maintain. There are also missing features in Avalon that we hope will be added, such as administrative, technical and provenance metadata; transcription integration; the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer integration mentioned in the development roadmap; specialized research workflow interface (comparable to a platform like Databrary); and user annotations. Community sustainability is also a concern, as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant that secured its development is ending in January 2017.  However, we are delighted to learn about the recent IMLS grant to support the sustainability of Avalon through, among other developments, the integration of Archivematica. Ideally, in the long term, a workflow for ingesting content from Archivematica’s Dissemination Information Packages (i.e., access files optimized for the Web) into Avalon would need to be developed. In the short term, it is possible to keep the workflows separate and rely on Avalon directly for all transcoding during ingesting.
 
The presentation at the Literary Audio Symposium raised questions that we continue to consider. From a software architecture point of view, what conditions are necessary to facilitate the development of a sustainable feature-rich access platform for audio/video content? Does audio/video content need to be accessible in a separate system, or can it be accommodated in the same digital asset management system as all other special collections formats? Given that there is an inherent lack of awareness around digital preservation issues, how do we promote the development of sustainable and responsible preservation planning for audio and video? Should we continue to build a wide variety of niche repositories, or aim towards a strategy of using centralized repositories? Ultimately, governments and cultural institutions including libraries, archives, and museums have the responsibility of preserving digital research and cultural content, as well as making it accessible.

Indiana University and Northwestern University are pleased to announce Avalon 6.2 The newest version of Avalon includes a substantial number of improvements to the playlist feature, various bug fixes, and a preview of the MediaElement4 player. 

 A few of the playlist improvements include:

• A new visibility option, Share By Link, restricts viewing access to a playlist to users who have a unique and obfuscated URL
• Add all selected items to a playlist
• Add a section or all sections of an item to a playlist
• Playlist items can be copied from one playlist to another
• Entire playlists can be copied
• Playlist markers can be clicked to navigate to their respective time points

For the full release notes about Avalon 6.2, please refer to the Release page on GitHub.

If you have any questions, feel free to email a member of the team, ask questions through the Avalon discussion list (subscribe at our Connect page) or the Samvera community lists, or ping us on the #avalon channel on the Samvera Slack team.

Avalon's most recent demo video for Sprint #134 is now ready. The video demonstrates the following features:

• Unique shareable links for sharing private playlists
• Adding sections of an item to a playlist generates descriptive names
• Streaming on AWS Cloudfront with the updated media player
• LTI authentication for playlists

You can view the demo video here: Sprint #134

To view past Sprint demos, view the Avalon Sprint Demo Collection.

Our waffle board, #Avalon slack chat on the Samvera Community channel and our renewed commitment to shareable sprint demos are all measures to bring community insight and inspiration to the Avalon code and design.

Playlists in the Avalon Media System continue to receive improvements, as seen in the latest demo video for Sprint #133. This video highlights the following features:

• Copying items from one playlist into another
• Adding multiple items to a playlist using an item's section and structural metadata
• Rewrite of batch ingest functionality

Watch the demo here: Sprint Demo #133.

To view all demos, check out the Avalon Sprint Demo Collection.

Our waffle board, #Avalon slack chat on the Samvera Community channel and our renewed commitment to shareable sprint demos are all measures to bring community insight and inspiration to the Avalon code and design.

The demo video for Sprint 132 is now ready for viewing, and demonstrates the following improvements:

• Copy playlist feature
• Improved markers and scrubber for media objects
• Progress toward mediaelement4 upgrade

Watch the video here: Sprint Demo 132.

To view all demos, check out the Avalon Sprint Demo Collection.

Our waffle board, #Avalon slack chat on the Samvera Community channel and our renewed commitment to shareable sprint demos are all measures to bring community insight and inspiration to the Avalon code and design.

Avalon Sprint Demo 131 is now ready.

The demo video showcases organizational improvements to Avalon's playlist feature, including:

• Pagination for multiple playlists
• Playlist search bar

Watch the video here: https://pawpaw.dlib.indiana.edu/media_objects/wp988j816

To view all demos, here's our Avalon collection: http://bit.ly/2apvrmd

Our waffle board, #Avalon slack chat on the HydraPartners channel and our renewed commitment to shareable sprint demos are all measures to bring community insight and inspiration to the Avalon code and design.

Northwestern University and Indiana University are pleased to announce the release of Avalon Media System 6.1. This update to Avalon 6 includes a full migration path from Avalon 5 to Avalon 6, the ability to control Avalon’s embedded content player via JavaScript, and a variety of bug fixes.
 
Highlights include:

• The full, production-ready release of the Avalon 5.x to Avalon 6 migration tool
• Avalon Player API: control Avalon’s embedded player via client-side Javascript
• Improved behavior for setting object leases and import of bibliographic metadata
• Numerous bug fixes

For more information about the release, see our release notes on Github and the documentation on upgrading Avalon to release 6.1.
 
If you have any questions, feel free to email any member of the team, ask questions through the Avalon discussion list (subscribe at http://www.avalonmediasystem.org/connect) or the Samvera community lists, or ping us on the #avalon channel on the Samvera Slack team (https://wiki.duraspace.org/x/J4o2BQ).
 
Development of Avalon is supported in part by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Avalon was mentioned in a recent blog post from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The post, titled "Enhancing Digital Collection Tools Through Collaboration," discusses the recent IMLS grant awarded to Avalon due in part to the project embracing "strategic collaboration." The progress made on Avalon is supported by a partnership between Northwestern University and the Indiana University Libraries.

Read the full post here: https://www.imls.gov/news-events/upnext-blog/2017/05/enhancing-digital-c...

Additionally, Northwestern Libraries featured Avalon in a news update, discussing the grant and the future development of the Avalon Media System.

Read the news update here: http://www.library.northwestern.edu/about/news/library-news/2017/imls-gr...

Avalon demo for sprint 127 is now ready for viewing.

The following features are highlighted in this Avalon demo:

• Standalone IIIF-compliant media player
• Migration from Avalon 5 to Avalon 6

Watch Demo 127 here: https://pawpaw.dlib.indiana.edu/media_objects/xp68kg20b

To view all demos, here's our Avalon collection: http://bit.ly/2apvrmd

Our waffle board, #Avalon slack chat on the HydraPartners channel and our renewed commitment to shareable sprint demos are all measures to bring community insight and inspiration to the Avalon code and design.

The Avalon team's demo for sprint 126 is now available for viewing.

The following features are shown in our latest public demo video:

• Michael Klein shows Avalon running in the cloud on Amazon Web Services.
• Brian Keese demonstrates the Player API, allowing for control of Avalon's embedded player by simple javascript.
• Chris Colvard demonstrates features of the Avalon 5 to Avalon 6 migration tool.

Watch Demo 126 here: https://pawpaw.dlib.indiana.edu/media_objects/t722h880z

To view all demos, here's our Avalon collection: http://bit.ly/2apvrmd

Our waffle board, #Avalon slack chat on the HydraPartners channel and our renewed commitment to shareable sprint demos are all measures to bring community insight and inspiration to the Avalon code and design.