Definitions
- Authenticated users - A user who can access Avalon using a valid identifier and authentication combination supported by your institution. Publicly accessibly items do not require authentication for access.
- Collection - A collection is a grouping of items for administrative and discovery purposes. Items belong to one and only one collection.
- Collection Staff - Collection staff refers to individuals that have been assigned specific roles for a collection: managers, editors and depositors. Administrators are also considered collection staff although they are not listed per collection. Collection staff have set permissions to edit, delete, publish items based on their assigned roles.
- File - A single media file (i.e. sound recording, moving image) that is part of an item; one or more files can exist for a single item (e.g. 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).
- Item - A single item (media object) accessible through one Avalon page; consists of one or more media files and metadata describing the media file(s).
- Unit - A unit is a grouping of collections for administrative and discovery purposes. Usually, a unit will map to an administrative unit. Collections belong to one and only one unit. A collection's unit is just a label: there are no privileges associated with units.
Accessibility
See the Accessibility entry for information regarding the accessibility of the Avalon site and media player.
Logging In
Authenticated users can access additional functions by logging in to the Avalon Media System. Some items are not publicly available, but may be available to an authenticated user if they have been assigned access by collection staff. Additionally, authenticated users can create and save playlists.
On the Avalon home page, click "Sign in>>" (upper right)
At the Login page, enter your username and password, click Login/Sign In Button.
Browsing and Searching
Browsing and searching is powered by Blacklight and Solr indexing. Flexible search features include Unicode support, Advanced Full-Text Search Capabilities, and faceted searching to help end users and Collection Staff refine their search results. Avalon also auto-generates search suggestions. Avalon provides multiple sorting options for search results, including relevancy sorting, and allows the user to set the number of results shown per page. Once items are added to Avalon, Near Real-Time indexing occurs. No additional steps are needed to index newly added or changed items.
Labels for sections are not searchable.
Boolean Commands (AND, OR, NOT) and Truncation are not supported by Avalon at this time.
By default, Avalon uses Solr's DisMax Query Parser (or dismax), which is designed to process simple phrases without a need for any complex syntax. There is support for + (required) and - (excluded) words, as well as the use of quotes for phrase searching.
Solr also comes with an Extended DisMax Query Parser (edismax), which supports the capabilities of dismax as well as:
- Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT in addition to + and -
- Parenthesis groupings for complex queries
- Wildcards
- Range queries on Numeric and Date fields (e.g., 1963 TO 1971)
- Better "proximity boost" matching
- Smart partial escaping
Avalon does not use edismax by default. Contact your system administrator to make changes to the Solr configuration.