The Avalon Media System: A Platform for Access-Controlled Delivery of Time-Based Media

Jon W. DunnIndiana University Libraries

jwd@iu.edu

Stuart L. BakerNorthwestern University Library

stubaker@northwestern.edu

The Avalon Media System is a robust, fully open source solution for curating and providing online access to digital audio and video collections in libraries and archives. The system is being developed collaboratively by the libraries at Indiana University and Northwestern University, in partnership with ten additional institutions that have committed resources for testing, evaluation, and feedback. In this demonstration, we are showing the capabilities of Version 1.0 of Avalon, which was released in May 2013.

Avalon Media System

Archival Storage

Authentic-ation

LMS, websites

ILSHydrant Rails App

All Users

Desktop,Mobile

Browser,Drop box

SearchBrowseView

IngestDescribeManage

Integrations

CollectionManagers

Authoriz-ation

Users

Fedora Solr Matterhorn Media Server

Media Player(Matterhorn Engage)

Can-Can

Ruby-horn

Hydra Head

Black-light

Omni-Auth

Version 1.0 provides:1. An audio and video player that works in desktop and mobile web browsers.2. Integration with multiple authentication systems and manage- ment of group-based authorization of access to media content.3. Both manual and automated batch ingest capabilities.4. A search interface for MODS descriptive metadata based on the Blacklight discovery tool.5. Ingest and management functionality built using the Ruby on Rails-based Hydra framework.

The system leverages a number of other open source tools. In addition to the Hydra framework and Blacklight discovery interface, audio and video processing and playback capabilities are based on technology from the Opencast Matterhorn project, metadata persistence is provided by the Fedora digital repository system, and metadata indexing is provided by Apache Solr.

facebook.com/AvalonMediaSys

@AvalonMediaSys

avalonmediasystem.org

The architecture of Avalon is designed to be modular and extensible in order to support integration into and with other academic systems, including integrated library systems, learning management systems, and eventually, scholarly annotation and research tools.

Future versions will add support for more granular access control and authorization, structural metadata for navigation of content, capabilities for bookmarking and playlists, and transcripts.

The Avalon Media System project is supported by a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and is based in part on previous work on the open source Variations digital music library system supported by the National Science Foundation and by IMLS.

Avalon deployment scenario

Avalon system architecture

Token-based stream authorization