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2025-02-24 Avalon User Roundtable Meeting

2025-02-24 Avalon User Roundtable Meeting

Owned by Emily Lynema
Last updated: Feb 24, 2025
4 min read

Meeting Time

Monday, February 24, at 1 PM Eastern

Attendees

  • Jon Cameron (Indiana University)

  • Emily Lynema (Indiana University)

  • Jason Coleman (NEC)

  • Heather Greer Klein (Samvera)

  • Chris Colvard (Indiana University)

  • Kee-Young Moon (UMD)

  • Patrick Burden (WVU)

  • Josh Westgard (UMD)

  • Stephen Gurnick (UCLA Library)

Zoom Link

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

Agenda/Notes

  • New avalonmediasystem.org website, hosted as a static site on Samvera infrastructure

  • All Avalon-related email discussion should now go to a single email list: avalon-l@list.iu.edu

  • Avalon 8.0 update

    • Upgrade instructions complete. Would be great to enhance with experiences from other institutions.

    • Fedora 6 migration at IU is still in progress. Testing an updated version of the Fedora 4 export tool that will hopefully allow traversing our large root node.

    • Aiming for deployment in May.

  • Upgrade process / experiences for Avalon institutions

    • How have you handled code customizations, etc? What challenges have you faced?

    • UCLA, Stephen Gurnick

      • Moved from Voyager catalog to Alma and took some tweaking to get the MARC record import working again.

      • Been using Avalon for 4-5 years; primarily used by Music Library

      • Use Samvera for digital library application (in a non-standard way), but don’t have in-house knowledge of Avalon

      • Try to do upgrades as infrequent as possible b/c it is a bigger deal for them.

      • They do have a fair amount of UI customizations to support UCLA library branding

      • whenever they do an upgrade, they have to merge in all of the UI changes they made, so this is kind of a headache. Uses a manual diff in git to help support this.

      • so have to do a fair amount of testing to make sure nothing breaks

      • Once the UI stuff is done, it tends to be more straightforward

      • Running Avalon on a standard VM, no containers.

      • Uses Ansible and Capistrano for deployments

      • Stephen is a sysadmin, not a dev, so more just trying to keep things working

      • Upgraded from 7.6 to 7.7.2 because trying to get off Solr 7 and onto Solr 9.

      • Solr reindex was more challenging - not sure how long it would take, but now there is a reindexing script that helped

      • https://avalon-streaming.library.ucla.edu

      • Not sure that they will make it to Fedora 6 version; might stop at Avalon 7.8.

      • One issue they have is Music wanting to ingest lots of things at the same time; they do have to break it up. UMD suggests limiting the number of parallel transcoding jobs to improve performance of individual jobs and make failure less likely.

      • did see improvement when separated the worker and web processes

    • UMD

      • currently running 7.4; they did upgrade about 2 years ago from 7.2 to 7.4

      • not a major version upgrade, but a minor version upgrade

      • previously did run an avalon 6, but replaced it rather than upgrading

      • upgrade wasn’t notably problematic

      • they have customized avalon a fair amount – added features, integrated with campus auth, some changes to how files are handled (after loading into dropbox, they are moved to another place for safekeeping and are downloadable), IP manager application that manages IP ranges and knows if user is on-campus, customized styling

      • Have code in github, pulled down commits for new version and made a huge commit, then fixed some local things. Took about 2 days. Fairly easy for them, but do have software development staff to work on this

      • Aiming for upgrade from 7.4 to current version (probably 7.8 or 8.0) in April / May.

      • Will be doing some development work at the same time. Starting in fall 2025, their course reserves unit will begin using Avalon. Planning to do some customization to support that, primarily to suppress features for course reserves they don’t want (ex: download)

      • Currently, they are deployed in Kubernetes. Will be moving from on-prem Kubernetes to EKS Kubernetes through AWS.

      • Suggestion: the terraform scripts for Avalon make use of some AWS services that could be useful in lieu of running containers / pods in Kubernetes.

    • NEC, Jason Coleman

      • They are in the midst of migrating to a new integrated library system as part of their consortia. This should take place in June 2025.

      • So they haven’t been able to focus on Avalon.

      • In the past, have heard that they had difficulty upgrading from 7.3 to 7.4.

      • In general, the recommendation is to step through each minor version steps for upgrade.

      • In the past, they upgraded to 7.4, but there were issues with importing MARC records. Maybe could the configuration file (settings.yml) that has the integration settings somehow got missed in the upgrade.

    • University of Louisville, John Merritt

      • at the end of last year, we updated our avalon-docker install to 7.7, which brought our avalon instance to 7.8. 

      • Being new to Avalon (and Docker), getting acclimated to the how it all fit together was the most challenging part. The upgrade instructions were indispensable! Once we were able to successfully reproduce upgrading our production-clone machine (after several learning attempts), production was straightforward. 

      • Our install is pretty much stock vanilla. I just made sure that my working “recipe” accounted for every step in each of the upgrade docs. At the time we upgraded, I think we had around 5000 items. Re-indexing took the longest (of course), but it was all done within a day.

        Also, we are in the process of updating the UI with more of our branding. Our site is still not open to the public but used primarily for class resources. 

      • Questions

        • what version were you running previously?

        • Is it possible to run an older version of avalon-docker and a newer version of core avalon?

  • Next meeting at regular day / time: March 17

  • Other agenda items?

Potential Future Agenda Items

  • Are any other institutions using the structure to provide navigation within recordings?

    • IU may want to make some changes to rules around segments, so would like to check in with anyone using it

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