2024-04-08 Avalon User Roundtable Meeting

Owned by Emily Lynema
Last updated: Apr 08, 2024
3 min read

Meeting Time

Monday, April 8 at 1 PM Eastern

Zoom Link

https://iu.zoom.us/j/84620830059?pwd=bWo3R081M3BtaytFMjZnS0FzQkd2dz09

Agenda/Notes

  • Avalon user survey

  • IU now upgraded to 7.7

    • https://media.dlib.indiana.edu

    • Took about 4 days to rebuild Solr index for 200,000 items.

    • Now using Solr9

    • We did run into some issues where some new Solr records were missing a couple of data elements, which was fixed by reindexing those records. Not sure why that happened.

    • UMD is on 7.4. Can they jump from 7.4 to 7.7 or do they need to upgrade to each individual - Emily will return to this question via email and we can also discuss in May round table. Added customizations to 7.4, and would like to keep those as part of 7.7.

      • customizations: token to share download/stream access, help menu on navigation bar, access control for campus-only materials

    • NEC: last time they tried to upgrade, couldn’t get past 7.3. This was an issue with bib_retriever. They really want to upgrade to 7.7, but need to get past this. They use Voyager now, but moving to Folio by spring 2025.

  • Downloading derivative files directly from MCO

    • Is this a use case that anyone has where they need to obtain the derivative files for distribution?

    • NEC: have had to discourage download of materials due to copyright concerns. ex: purchase a DVD and upload for access; faculty asking for access to take snippets and do things with it and have to say no. May be situations with oral histories they will be uploading soon where they would ask for approval from the interviewees to distribute. But mostly requests have been for copyrighted materials.

    • UMD: currently, most requests are for materials that are UMD only. Have process to create a temp access to the item via a URL that is valid for 2 weeks. Share the URL with researcher so they can access to item via streaming or download. Development team implemented this custom access feature within Avalon.

    • NEC: have a generic library account for outside researchers to use Avalon; then expire the account once they are ready to deactivate access

  • Items from other institutions

    • Demonstration of Help menu content from UMD (Kee-Young Moon)

      • https://av.lib.umd.edu

      • Content is coming to Avalon from digitization center or content creators in multiple buildings. Need a ‘how to’ for Avalon when new users are hired, but don’t have person dedicated to supplying training.

      • Created a help site outside of Avalon: https://sites.google.com/umd.edu/avalonhelp/home. Contains video tutorials produced at UMD.

      • This is intended for staff users, and is only available in the menu after you log into Avalon

      • Would others be interested in having a Help link in the Avalon menu for logged in users, or in somehow sharing this repository of documentation?

      • Students can make obvious mistakes without training, for example, they’re not supposed to create separate items for side a and side b of a tape

      • Do others have the same issue with training?

        • IU: Jon C. schedules individual staff training; could ask school of music / archives of traditional music how they train their student staff

        • NEC: experience with student aide inputing metadata required lots of QC back in variations, so now Jason does the input himself. Want to wait for Avalon upgrade before considering hiring students again.

    • Any updates from IU on Solr matching config from last time

      • Per documentation, Avalon does not support Boolean operators

      • When searching transcript text, there will be more text. Will we want to utilize Boolean operators?

      • Ebsco utilizes Boolean operators.

      • IUCAT seems to support Boolean operators within Blacklight, so this may be doable?

      • Folks at IU are not very aware of how the current Solr config works, but will be learning more as we start to experiment with adding transcripts to search index

      • Would be helpful to think of some example of ways we might want to use Boolean operators

      • Emily would like to survey other Samvera users who include full-text in their search

    • Created issue #5750 for retaining search term in search box

  • Future agenda items?

    • Demo of temp access URL customization from UMD for outside researchers (token implementation) - May

      • discussion of how institutions provide access to outside researchers

      • also discussion of how authentication and account management works - how does this flow work at UMD for users to get Avalon accounts generated?

    • Demo of LTI integration with course management system - consider this topic for May?

    • Potential conversation around upgrade process for institutions that have been using Avalon for awhile (how to handle code customizations, etc.)

    • Bulk metadata editing discussion - what are the needs for this in Avalon? Are there tools in the community that could be re-used to help?

    • Summary of survey responses

Attendees