The Collection Manager's Guide for Avalon Media System explains Avalon features, functionality, and how to navigate the system. It is designed for the Collection Manager, whomever is responsible for uploading content, editing content, or providing content for playback through Avalon. See your system administrator for issues that relate to configuring Avalon "under the hood." This guide is for R1 deployment number ?????, if you are running a later version of Avalon some of the known issues may have been resolved. See the Known Issues page for descriptions of ways we are making Avalon better.
On the Avalon home page, click on Sign In>>
At the Login page, enter your username and password, click Login/Sign In Button.
If you log in and do not have editing rights, you will need to be added to the "collection_manager" group. Contact a system admin to be added to the group.
Browsing and searching is powered by Blacklight and Solr indexing. Flexible search features include Unicode support; Advanced Full-Text Search Capabilities; faceted searching to help end users and collection managers refine their search results. Avalon also auto-generates search suggestions. Avalon provides multiple sorting options for search results, including relevancy sorting or sorting by specific. Once items are added to Avalon, Near Real-time indexing occurs. No additional steps are needed to index newly added or changed objects.
Boolean Commands and Truncation are not supported by Avalon at this time.
Two workflow facets are available viewable only to Collection Managers:
Published: Allows you to navigate to all published or unpublished items
Created by: Allows you to see items you created and/or items created by users in the Collections Managers group
See Player & Controls Known Issues (need to be added somewhere - Red5 needs to hit play 3 times to play again, Streaming quality starts at the beginning, multisection parts need to change the quality for each section)
Definitions:
Avalon object - A single item (media object) accessible through one Avalon page; consists of one or more content files and metadata describing the content file(s)
content file - A single media file (i.e., sound recording, moving image) that is part of an Avalon object; one or more content files could make up the media for a single Avalon object (for example, 3 .mp4 files combined to form an entire movie, 6 .wav files together make up the recording of an entire orchestra concert, or a sound file and a moving image file together represent a video with accompanying lecture commentary)
Types of files, size of files, etc
For a list of source file formats and codecs that are supported in Avalon, see the Avalon Media System Supported Source Formats and Codecs documentation on our wiki
There is an individual file size limit of 250MB when uploading files manually through the Avalon Web interface.
There is no practical limit on the maximum file size of a source file uploaded to the system through the Avalon Dropbox or through the Batch Upload feature.
File names cannot include the following characters: [ ] < > | &
Dropbox - Avalon’s dropbox is used to import large files over 250MB.
Uploading files - Large media files are placed in a dedicated Avalon dropbox (a file server usually connected via SFTP or a mapped network drive). Contact your system administrator for dropbox location and connection information.
Once files are mounted into the dropbox, Collection Managers can go to the Create menu to open the dropbox and attach selected files to an Avalon Object. File processing begins once media is attached from the Dropbox.
Deleting files from the Avalon Dropbox - You can delete files from the Avalon Dropbox through the web interface or directly on the server the Dropbox is located:
Thumbnails
Thumbnails are captured by Opencast Matterhorn at the 2 second mark of the video. This setting is customizable by your system administrator (insert sys admin customization link). If the item audio, the thumbnail is an illustration of headphones. If the item contains audio and video, the thumbnail is headphones and a screen.
Troubleshooting
To correct errors with one or more content files within an Avalon object:
Place corrected content files for that object in the top level of the dropbox directory (contact your system administrator for dropbox location and connection information). Once processed, the corrected content files will be available in Edit mode for the Avalon object from the Manage file(s) > Import from a dropbox feature. Delete the incorrect content files from the object in the Manage file(s) step of the Avalon object Edit mode, add the corrected files, click Update in the Associated fiel(s) section, then Save at the bottom of the Manage file(s) form.
To correct errors with the information about an Avalon object:
Batch - Avalon's Batch Ingest feature provides a method of building one or more media objects at a time from uploaded content and metadata outside the user interface. A batch ingest is started by uploading an Ingest Package (the combination of content and metadata) consisting of one Manifest File and zero or more Content Files to the Avalon dropbox.
Known issues/Troubleshooting
How to handle errors for Avalon objects within a batch
Sometimes a batch ingest will result in an exception, with one or more content files failing to ingest. You will receive this information through an email message after your batch ingest processes. If a content file failure occurs, the following steps can be tried to ingest the content again:
Avalon form: To re-ingest a single Avalon object (one row of the batch ingest spreadsheet), place all content files for that object in the top level of the dropbox directory. Once processed, the content files will be available from the Manage file(s) > Import from a dropbox feature in Avalon and the object can be created using Avalon’s form.
Reload spreadsheet: Another option to re-ingest a single Avalon object or set of objects is to reduce the batch spreadsheet to only those failed objects and reload the spreadsheet to the same location as before. This will run the batch again but only for the failed content files.
If a single Avalon object with multiple content files has one or some of those files fail (but not all), either delete that object from Avalon and use the Reload spreadsheet method to load the entire object again or use the Avalon form method to add those failed content files to the dropbox and append them to the appropriate object in Avalon.
In release 1, items created via batch will by default inherit the access control status of “Collection Managers Only”. To make items visible to the public, to all authenticated users or to specific users or groups, you must edit each item individually.
Via Web - Web ingest is used for manual upload of one or more media objects.
There is an individual file size limit of 250MB when uploading a file manually through the Avalon Web interface.
The Avalon Web interface allows for labels to be added to individual sections of a multipart Avalon object.
Avalon Objects can be created without associating media. Metadata and access control information can be created first which allows for collection managers to come back to that Avalon Object and associate the correct media at a later time. You must click "save and continue" to progress through the steps even if no changes are made.
Deleting files -
Deleting a Single Avalon Object deletes the record from the database and the derivatives created for each media file.
Avalon Web Interface and Batch Ingest Metadata Creation
Click the Create menu. After uploading a file, the user cannot advance before clicking the Save button. The user will then advance to the Resource Description menu. The fields Title, Main Contributor(s), and Publication Date must be populated in order to create a resource in the system.
Items with multiple tracks
Labeling, Ordering, How metadata works
If a single Avalon object is made up of multiple content files, those content files can be uploaded separately to the object, labeled individually, and reordered at any time. If there is more than one content file, each content file will be listed on the Avalon object’s page and can be selected for individual playback. Labels specific to these content files can be helpful for users to better understand the content of the object. If no label is provided for a content file, the filename will be listed. You must click Update in the labeling section for labels to persist.
Suggestions for controlled vocabulary use
Some fields in Avalon have recommended controlled vocabularies. Genre, all types of Subjects (Location, Time Period) and, if possible, names of creators and contributors. The contextual help accompanying the fields in the Resource Description form contains links to the recommended vocabularies. Additionally, the Batch Ingest Package Format specifies controlled vocabularies for those same fields.
System groups roles and policies
Collection Managers can view, edit and delete all aspects of Avalon objects and files.
Group Managers can add or remove members to existing groups, create or remove group. Collections Managers can not edit policies and permissions for groups - a system administration must do that (link to dev doc).
Creating new groups
Group Managers can create new groups for the purpose of sharing specific resources with groups of users. These groups will have view access only. No ability exists in the interface to edit policies for groups. To add users to a group, enter their Avalon username as displayed in the upper right corner upon logging in. This is usually an email address.
Group names must not include blanks. Note that the Manage Groups interface will allow the creation of a group name with embedded spaces, but any members of that group will no longer have access to items in the collection.