2024-09-9 Avalon User Roundtable Meeting

Owned by Emily Lynema
Last updated: Sept 09, 2024
3 min read

Meeting Time

Monday, September 9 at 1 PM Eastern

Attendees

  • Emily Lynema (Indiana)

  • Joshua Westgard (UMD)

  • Jon Cameron (Indiana)

  • John Merritt (Louisville)

  • Jason Coleman (NEC)

Zoom Link

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

Agenda/Notes

  • Does it work to move our monthly meeting from 2nd Monday of the month to 3rd Monday of the month to accommodate UMD folks?

    • No conflicts

    • Emily will follow up on email / Slack

  • Use cases for tools to update metadata in bulk in Avalon

    • Josh: UMD has advocated for this

      • For both paged and streaming media, do everything in batches. Don’t do one by one item creation b/c don’t have staffing to do that.

      • Import things in bulk, and subsequently to update in bulk using the same process.

      • Batch import allows you to re-upload items that failed to upload based on the ID.

      • First download the metadata as a CSV, make changes, and then reload. Download must have identifier saying which item.

      • How to know which fields to overwrite? In paged media repository, which talks directly to Fedora, it pulls down the RDF, does a diff, and updates only the changed fields

      • Ideas about how to record metadata change over time, and want to be able to adjust. For example, their permalink is Handle; have put Handles on all objects in Avalon. When added that feature, had to go back and retroactively add them to items already in the system. Because they couldn’t do that, they added functionality to Avalon to mint new Handles for items that didn’t have one. Bulk editing metadata records to remove harmful language; applies more to library catalog b/c that has been around longer, but there are older descriptions in Avalon might want to look at.

    • Jason (NEC)

      • Ex: being able to come up with a series in Avalon. Have several concert recordings that are in a particular series. Need to change a concert from concert series A or concert series B. This would involve updating title, contributor, or statement of responsibility.

      • Spreadsheet type system would probably work for them, too.

    • John M (Louisville)

      • not at the point they need bulk editing yet

    • Jon C. (IU)

      • ex: updating Rights Statement for a group of records that have been reviewed for copyright; adding content warning to summaries

      • also suggested the idea of downloading a set of items, editing in a CSV, and re-uploading

  • IU is proposing to make Subjects o the media item page in Avalon hyperlinked so that users can click on a Subject to match to a search for other items with that Subject.

  • IU also proposed making Publication Date no longer a required field.

  • summation of Avalon user survey (slides)

    • User accessible usage statistics (NEC)

      • running out of space. Would like to remove media items based on how often accessed

      • every quarter, library has to submit a report to the board on how they are using their tools. If can show that students are using Avalon beyond just course reserves, this is a way to justify existence on campus

    • allowing item access during date range? what is the use case?

      • time-limited access to a student user

      • temporarily making materials available to the public for online exhibits

      • UMD has sort of solve the latter use case (making materials available to the public) by allowing the creation of time-limited tokens to access materials. this is a feature they’d be happy to contribute back.

    • IP based access controls seem to be slow

      • could this be related to how wildcards are used to express IPs?

      • IU has also noticed some slowness around loading IP based permissions

    • stability of multiple simultaneous ingests

      • NEC has had issues when trying to upload 2 videos at the same time - when one trancoding;t he other can fail. NEC is doing mostly manual uploads rather than batch ingest.

      • UMD has done lots of bulk ingesting without running into this - things do sometimes fail nd have to re-transcode

    • LTI

      • NEC uses Neo for its LTI. For faculty giving commercial recordings to Jason, he gives them a permalink to the catalog record.

      • UMD is not using LTI now, but will be doing a pilot to replace their course reserves with a separate instance of Avalon (and ILL). Will be doing LTI integration for that.

  • Future agenda items?

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

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