Building and using an open source community-supported system to manage audiovisual materials for a digital archive/library has many advantages and challenges. Being able to dictate the features, have a system speak to specific needs, and have staff on hand that can change or fix problems is certainly appealing. Embarking on this effort with an established open community, such as Samvera, has the advantages of a robust community of developers and service vendors to turn to for help. Managing needed customisations to core code base, keeping track of updates and contributing to the community, however, is challenging. For WGBH, a public television station with a robust 60-year archive, most customisations are due to the use PBCore to structure the metadata of the audio-visual items. This paper focuses on WGBH’s efforts to build a system for its Media Library and Archives based on the Samvera digital repository framework and its Hyrax and Avalon Media System ‘products’. and Abstract
Indiana University and Northwestern University, in collaboration with nine partner institutions, recently completed the last year of a three-year IMLS-funded effort to build the Avalon Media System, an open source solution for managing and providing access to digital audio and video collections, based on Fedora and the Hydra repository software development framework. As the Avalon platform reaches maturity, several institutions are in the process of implementing Avalon both to replace current time-based media access solutions and to support new use cases. In addition, new funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will support continued work to develop new features, grow and provide support for the community of adopters, and move Avalon towards organizational and financial sustainability. This panel will bring together project leaders from Indiana and Northwestern, along with Avalon community members at the University of Virginia and Stanford University, to share experiences of implementing Avalon at their institutions, integrating Avalon with other local systems, and supporting Avalon to enable a variety of use cases in research, teaching, and learning. Panel members will also discuss future development plans and provide a preview of how the project intends to transition from a grant-supported endeavor to a community-sustained solution. and Slides for a panel presentation given at the Open Repositories conference in 2015 held in Indianapolis described thus