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On January 15th, Avalon Community Manager, Ryan Steans, invited Avalon users, those curious about Avalon and beyond, to join in and think about Avalon not just as an open source resource, but as a community.

This 30 minute presentation covered a wide number of issues from how to first engage to how to participate in development.

Topics include:  

• So, you want to check out Avalon? – what folks new to Avalon can do to try the technology
• Let’s Talk! – Avalon Slack and Avalon List Serves
• Online and In Person – Avalon Office Hours and Avalon Forum
• One of Us! –  How you can assist in Avalon development
• What we’re doing in the coming year – training modules, co-development and more!

To view the video:  click here

To view the slide deck from this presentation:  click here

To learn more about the Avalon Forum and to view prior forum presentations:  click here

For more information or any questions, email me at:  http://www.avalonmediasystem.org/contact

Join us on December 12th at 4:00, Eastern! (1:00 Pacific)

Topics will include:  

• Upgrade of Avalon at Univ. of Virginia with Mike Durbin
• Development efforts in batch upload with Avalon and WGBH with Sadie Roosa and Chris Colvard

You can learn more about the upcoming Forum under: Events or The Forum Link.  

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

Indiana University has received a $1.2 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in conjunction with New York Public Library, University of Texas at Austin and information management consultant AVP in order to develop a scalable Audiovisual Metadata Platform, known as AMP, to generate searchable time-stamped descriptions for audiovisual content.  

Read more at the Indiana University website.

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.  

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.

Other events related to Avalon (abstracts from the conference)

The Avalon Team is happy to announce the release of Avalon 6.4.4

What can you expect in this release?

Updates and Changes

• Embeds are now able to be tracked with Google Analytics - track views of your media played locally in Avalon as well as where you've embedded it in external websites
• CAPTCHA configurability added to the comments page
• Minor updates to Avalon Intercom 

Bug Fixes

• Resolved issues with file paths that arise in certain system configurations
• Rubyzip dependency updated to avoid security vulnerability

Avalon 6.4.4 is now available for download at the Avalon GitHub repository.  

Click here to download and to learn more.

For any questions or assistance, please email us at:  avalon-discuss-l@list.indiana.edu

Or find us on Slack at: samvera.slack.com/messages/avalon

Joining a Slack team requires an invitation, but anyone can generate an automatic invite to the Samvera Community slack channel using the following form: Samvera Slack invite

 
 
For upgrade documentation:  https://wiki.dlib.indiana.edu/display/VarVideo/For+System+Administrators
 
Those interested in exploring Avalon should contact us at:  http://www.avalonmediasystem.org/contact
 
Our Github:  https://github.com/avalonmediasystem/

The Avalon Team invites you to join us for Office Hours every week on Tuesdays from August 28th to October 30th.  We're currently piloting a program to enable anyone with an interest in Samvera to spend some time with our team to discuss all things Avalon Media System.

For full information, click here.

When

Join us on Tuesdays at 2:00 Eastern/ 11:00 Pacific beginning on August 28th

Where 

We'll have both Slack and BlueJeans webconference options available

And, two weeks per month we'll feature special a special focus

Focus on Deployment and Support

August 28th and September 25th

Avalon Community Tech Lead Chris Colvard and Phuong Dinh will be available to discuss Avalon implementation and management & maintenance of your Avalon System.

Focus on Avalon Roadmap and Community

September 4th and October 2nd

Product owners David Schober and Jon Cameron will discuss work on the Avalon Roadmap, what's going on in the development cycles, and what we're looking at next for Avalon.

• Files ingested from a dropbox are properly handled when the masterfile management strategy is set to 'move' #2903
• Batch ingest emails are sent successfully, even when items are deleted by users before the job completes #2892
• Manifest files are deleted after reading and before any processing has happened to avoid race conditions or other errors #2919

For any questions or assistance, please email us using our contact form.

or join our discussion:  avalon-discuss-l@list.indiana.edu

Or find us on Slack at: 

Avalon Slack team: samvera.slack.com/messages/avalon

Joining a Slack team requires an invitation, but anyone can generate an automatic invite to the Samvera Community slack channel using the following form: Samvera Slack invite

Avalon Media System is proud to announce the successful completion of integrations between Avalon, a Samvera solution bundle for audio and video management, and OHMS, the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer.

Libraries and archives host rich collections that include audio and video recordings of oral histories and interviews, often first-hand accounts of events important to cultural memory.  While many of these recordings have languished in formats that made them inaccessible to researchers and, in many cases, the public, the combination of OHMS and Avalon can make these oral histories accessible and manageable, leveraging open technologies designed specifically for the specific needs of libraries and archives.

The integrations, developed by AVP (formerly AVPreserve), will enable media managers to use the latest version of OHMS to index or connect interview transcripts with video or audio media, managed and stored in the robust Avalon Media System via Avalon's JavaScript player API.  Paired with the powerful time-based search, discovery and navigation features in OHMS, the final product will create a package complete with transcripts and menus derived from user-created metadata, ready for display.  

Douglas Boyd of Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries states “Indiana University is the first institution besides the University of Kentucky to make a significant contribution to the OHMS code.  We are always looking for ways to make OHMS a more effective solution and the incorporation of Avalon represents significant step forward for OHMS and Avalon.”

This work was supported by the Indiana University Office of the Bicentennial as part of Indiana University’s Bicentennial Oral History Project.  Avalon Media System is developed by Indiana University Libraries and Northwestern University Libraries, with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  OHMS is developed and managed at the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries and was made open source and free through support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. 

For more information regarding Avalon and OHMS, please contact Avalon at:  http://www.avalonmediasystem.org/contact

Avalon is seeking your input to help us create Avalon Media System specific training.

You can tell us what areas would be of the most use for your team when it comes to training, and what works best for you in terms of delivery.  

Just fill out this brief survey to give us some ideas.  The survey should only take about 5-10 minutes to complete, and if you have additional ideas for what we could offer, we're all ears.

We'll follow up soon to let you know our plans!

If you'd like to discuss training in more detail or have other topics of discussion, as always, please use the following channels

• email the list-serve at:  avalon-discuss-l@list.indiana.edu
• if you're a Samvera Community member, just look for us on Slack at #avalon
• or contact the Community Manager directly at:  ryan dot steans at northwestern dot edu