avalon at stanford university libraries
DESCRIPTION
Bess Sadler and Hannah Frost presented "Avalon at Stanford University Libraries" as part of the "Avalon Media System: Implementation and Community" session at the 2014 Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum on October 28, 2014.TRANSCRIPT
Avalonat Stanford University Libraries
Bess Sadler – Manager for Application Development
Hannah Frost - Services Manager
Stanford Digital Repository
Stanford Media Preservation Lab
DLF Atlanta October 28, 2014
• Maintain long-term access to at-risk materials through high-quality reformatting– In-house whenever possible
• Support collection development
• Promote use of media in teaching and research
• Integrate with digital library– Services– Technology
• Develop expertise, best practices, community
Objectives of SUL’s Media Preservation Program
Michael in Video Lab
Maintain long-term access to at-risk materials through high-quality reformatting
Support collection development
Promote use of media in teaching and research
Integrate with digital library✔ Services☐ Technology: discovery and delivery
Develop expertise, best practices, community
Objectives of SUL’s Media Preservation Program
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2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
69 Itemsrequested in
Sept 2014 alone!
Patron Digitization Requests: Rising
Top Collection Websites: Media
Media Access Working Group
Recommendations
• Augment systems and tools that – Reduce ingest backlog
– Promote discovery and use
• Wrangle the rights
• Gather more metrics to inform future decision making
Keys to a Solution at Stanford Libraries
• Technology– Open source
– Open minded and flexible
• Community– Vibrant
– Digital library-centric
Avalon at Stanford
• Meets all our basic needs– Functional, technical, philosophical
– Tested by Media Access Working Group
– Supported by Management
• Hiring a Media Infrastructure Engineer– Funded through a 2-year collection project
– Work starts ASAP!
What are your main use cases for
Avalon?
• Deposit of media produced by (with examples)– Students: documentary film program, engineering and product
design course projects, – Faculty: Observational research, fine arts performances, – Online learning initiatives: lectures, course reserves– Administration: Office of Development, Oral history program,
campus events
• Delivery of reformatted media produced in digital preservation workflows– Systematic reformatting of rare/unique archival and commercial
items at SMPL (13,000 and counting)– Satisfying requests by researchers (remote and on-site) for
online access to collection material
What other media solutions do you
have in place that Avalon replaces or
complements? • Will replace existing streaming infrastructure
(wowza) that is outdated and not integrated with SUL’s digital library discovery environment
• Will complement outsourced CDN services used for boutique collection web sites
• Will complement current Drupal infrastructure and future Spotlight exhibits, where curators and other librarians promote media collections and services through web sites
• May play into course management system currently in transition (from Sakai to Canvas)
Where are you on your
implementation or evaluation?
• Evaluation is complete, including a test installation of Avalon Release 2 in Fall 2013
• Currently interviewing for Media Infrastructure Engineer to lead the design, installation, and integration (2 year project starting approx. January 2015)
What staff resources have been
necessary to implement Avalon at
your institution?
• Parts of
– Product owner
– Service manager
– Software developer
– Infrastructure engineer
– System / Storage Administrator
– DevOps Systems configuration
What features do you most need
that are not currently in Avalon?
• Support for Wowza streaming server• Support for Open Annotations• Support for transcripts/captions: synchronization and
full-text search• Support for PBCore metadata (v2)• Integration with Fedora 4• IP-based access control• Hooks for capturing special license terms• Re-architecting Avalon as components that can be built
into a digital library ecosystem, instead of a tightly integrated out of the box solution
What would you like the Avalon
community to look like in the future?
• A healthy cadre of core developers/maintainers; the media space is always evolving and Avalon will need to keep up
• A vibrant, connected user community that reflects the requirements of scholars who use media in research and teaching
• Vendors who can help small installations with local implementation or offer hosted services
