Indiana University and Northwestern University, in collaboration with nine partner institutions, are completing the last year of a three-year IMLS-funded effort to build a fully open source solution for managing digital audio and video collections, known as the Avalon Media System. Now in its third full release, Avalon enables libraries and archives to easily curate, distribute and provide online access to their time-based media collections in support of teaching, learning and research. Avalon is based on the Hydra repository software development framework and employs several other open source technologies, including Opencast Matterhorn and Fedora.
Indiana, Northwestern, and several other Avalon community members are currently in the process of implementing Avalon for pilot or production use, both to replace existing time-based media access solutions and to support new use cases for media collections access for teaching, learning, and scholarship. The Avalon community is also exploring options for how the project transitions from a grant-supported project to a community-sustained activity, and Avalon in the process of taking on additional institutions as 'founding sponsors' to help support and guide Avalon's development and potential governance models.
This panel will bring together Avalon project leaders from Indiana and Northwestern, along with representatives from several other institutions involved in the Avalon community, to discuss Avalon's current capabilities, local implementation plans and experiences, future feature development, and options for sustainability.
Session Leaders
Jon Dunn, Indiana University
Julie Rudder, Northwestern University
Bess Sadler, Stanford University
Stephen Davis, Columbia University
Mike Durbin, University of Virginia
