Poster presented by Jon W. Dunn and Stuart L. Baker at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in July 2013.

1. The Avalon Media System:
A Platform for Access-Controlled Delivery of Time-Based Media
Jon W. Dunn
Indiana University Libraries
jwd@iu.edu
Stuart L. Baker
Northwestern 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
ILS
Hydrant Rails App
All Users
Desktop,
Mobile
Browser,
Drop box
Search
Browse
View
Ingest
Describe
Manage
Integrations
Collection
Managers
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