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The Avalon team is proud to announce the release of Avalon 7.0. Avalon 7 is a major release with changes relevant to end users, collection managers and system administrators.

Check out our GitHub for the release!

Features

Collections Index and Collection Landing Pages

Avalon 7 provides two new ways to explore and display collections: the collections index, a listing that shows each collection accessible to a user sorted alphabetically or by containing Unit, and collections landing pages, which provide a unique page for each collection where users can view a description, thumbnail and a preview of items within. Collection managers can now set thumbnails for collections as well as items.

Transcoding Pipeline

With this release of Avalon, the transition from Matterhorn to a self-managed transcoding process has been completed. Using the latest version of active-encode and the FFmpeg adapter, transcoding tasks are faster, leaner, and more flexible. A new transcoding dashboard also provides administrators a way to manage jobs directly within Avalon. While Matterhorn is no longer supported, full support is available for Amazon's Elastic Transcoder service.

New Homepage Design

Avalon's homepage has been redesigned. In addition to the visual change, Avalon allows for easy configuration of the featured collections now displayed on the homepage. The Avalon 6.x-style homepage can also still be used if desired.

Local User Management

A new authentication configuration is available through Persona. This module allows for administrators to quickly create user credentials without relying on an outside authentication system (LDAP, Shibboleth, etc.).

Updates and Other Changes

Sidekiq

The performant, feature-rich, and better maintained Sidekiq replaces Resque as our default background job engine. This aligns Avalon with most Samvera applications, including Hyrax, which have already made this switch.

MinIO

It is now possible to use a MinIO object store to avoid a shared storage requirement and decouple Avalon, Worker, and Streaming services from each other in alignment with 12 factor best practices.

Avalon API

The Avalon API has been updated to allow for access to resources based on system role. API keys issued to users now gate requests to permissions a user has within the system, rather than providing superuser rights for each issued key.

Bug Fixes

• Multiple styling issues on mobile browsers resolved
• Structural Metadata Editor now properly handles certain timecode formats in existing structure
• Caption files with empty terminating time ranges display properly when enabled

For Questions or Comments - please use any of the following modes of communication:

• email us using our contact page
• post to our discussion list
• join us on Slack

Avalon Media System and Notch8 are proud to announce Persona, a user-management add-on for Samvera-based repositories. The module allows for a team of administrators who manage hosted systems to quickly create user credentials without relying on an outside authentication system (LDAP, Shibboleth, etc.).  Persona also allows those performing help desk tasks to view the system as those experiencing an issue see it, bypassing complicated communication exchanges and replicating the issue locally.  Developed with help desk staff and system administrators in mind, the Persona module solves many of the difficulties inherent in managing services for a diversity of organizations.  

Key features of the module include the ability to:

• Define a local login strategy for end users
• Securely log in as an administrator without logging in through an outside authentication system
• From a dashboard, add or delete users
• Assume the identity of any user, regardless of identity provider, via the “Become” troubleshooting feature if you are an administrator.

The Avalon team and Notch8 extracted and extended the functionality from work originally done in Hyku. Persona, released as an open-source gem, is now available as a component that can be used with Avalon, Hyrax, or other Samvera-based products.

Avalon 6.5 includes IIIF manifest generation, a new editor for structural metadata, and integration with the Timeliner tool for annotation of AV materials, as well as a variety of updates for supporting libraries and components.

Check out our GitHub for the release!

Features

Structural Metadata Editor

A visual editor for creating and modifying section structure available on an item's Edit page. The new editor features a waveform visualization and interaction much like audio editing software such as Audacity or Adobe Audition.

IIIF Timeliner

Integration with Timeliner, a reimplementation of the Variations Audio Timeliner annotation tool. Create, edit and share Timelines using media from items within Avalon.

IIIF Presentation 3.0 Manifest Generation

IIIF manifests are now generated by Avalon for all items and can be retrieved from an application endpoint.

Updates and Bug Fixes

• Support for Rails 5.2
• Web upload limit on file size has been increased to 2 GB
• Title attribute is encoded properly in HTML embed code (#2930)
• Type-ahead in username input field no longer overrides values of a very short length (#2896)
• Updating collection information no longer removes staff users (#2994)

For Questions or Comments - please use any of the following modes of communication:

• email us using our contact page
• post to our discussion list
• join us on Slack
• or drop in on Avalon Virtual Office Hours on Tuesdays at 2:00 Eastern 

for more info - jump to 13:37 in the video

Avalon has released 6.4.5.  This is a minor release with changes intended to address security vulnerabilities with Rails and dependencies.

GitHub link

Download Info

Avalon & Open Journal System/ Avalon Timeliner Tool

Researcher Marcel LaFlamme will discuss how the scholarly journal "Cultural Anthropology" utilizes Avalon to supplement and support written content with audio and video, sharing ideas how Avalon can bring new life to your scholarly publications.

Avalon has been working with Digirati toward the development of the Timeliner tool.  This feature will enable folks to create a visual representation of audio files.  Examples of use cases include music faculty who wish to show learners how music is broken down into components and parts via visualization on the timeline of an audio file.

Avalon Demo #173

• Structural Metadata Editor
• Improvements
• Refactors
• Validations

See the new Structural Metadata Editor with waveform, HTML structural metadata trees, and much, much more!

Join us on March 13th, 4:00 Eastern/ 1:00 PM Pacific

TOPICS:

• Using Avalon with a journal: Cultural Anthropology (Marcel LaFlamme)
• First Look at the Timeliner Tool: Visualizing Music in a Linear Fashion (Maria Whitaker)

To connect to the Avalon Forum during a live event, click here.  

Researcher Marcel LaFlamme will discuss how the scholarly journal "Cultural Anthropology" utilizes Avalon to supplement and support written content with audio and video, sharing ideas how Avalon can bring new life to your scholarly publications.

Avalon has been working with Digirati toward the development of the Timeliner tool.  This feature will enable folks to create a visual representation of audio files.  Examples of use cases include music faculty who wish to show learners how music is broken down into components and parts via visualization on the timeline of an audio file.

As always, we'll be live and we hope you can join us to learn more and ask plenty of questions.  If you can't make it, we'll be placing the video online at the Avalon Forum Tab which links to our Avalon Demo site.

We held our Avalon Forum for February on the 13th.  As always, we’re making the recording available via Avalon Media System.

We invite you to view the February Forum which covers the following:

• University of Houston and Avalon - Emily Vinson, Audiovisual Archivist
• Structural Metadata Editor - Jon Cameron, Dananji Withana - Indiana Univ./ Adam Arling - Northwestern Univ.

And, as always, I do a bit of housekeeping.

You can learn more about the Forum or watch prior Avalon Forum sessions on the Avalon Forum page. 

Avalon Media System will hold our February Forum on 02/13/2019 at 4:00 PM Easter/ 1:00 Pacific

The Forum is a 30 minute webinar in which we discuss the latest at Avalon, invite our colleagues to discuss what’s going on locally with their installation, and provide a development update.

This month we’re featuring:

• University of Houston and Avalon - Emily Vinson, Audiovisual Archivist
• Structural Metadata Editor - Jon Cameron, Dananji Withana - Indiana Univ./ Adam Arling - Northwestern Univ.

Emily will share details of how Avalon is implemented at UH, their use cases and how they’d like to develop their use of Avalon. 

Our Avalon team members will talk about the new Structural Metadata Editor, which will enable users to create navigation within any Avalon media.

And, of course, we’ll have some housekeeping announcements and open the floor for questions and queries.

To connect to the Avalon Forum during a live event, click here.  

To view prior Avalon Forum recordings (via Avalon!), click here.

We look forward to seeing you at the Avalon Forum!