Meeting Time

Monday, May 19, at 1 PM Eastern

Attendees

• Emily Lynema (Indiana)

• Christine Peterson (Amigos)

• Kyle Ratliff (Michigan State)

• Joan Lindsay (Michigan State)

• Kee-Young Moon (Maryland)

• Alice Tippit (Northwestern)

• Edgar Garcia (Northwestern)

• Michael North (Northwestern)

• John Merritt (Louisville)

• Jason Coleman (NEC)

• Renee McConahy (MSU)

• Jon Dunn (Indiana)

• Josh Westgard (UMD)

• James (Northwestern)

• Marek Babala (Northwestern)

• David Venckus

Zoom Link

https://iu.zoom.us/j/83005000583?pwd=wUfCIwmFV7tfZyXe8AGvld58yp8sOc.1

Agenda/Notes

• Introductions

• Avalon 8.0.1 update

  • we recommend anyone interested in moving to Fedora 6 move to 8.0.1 release, rather than 8.0.0, due to a bugfix with streaming

• MSU Avalon implementation demo (Kyle Ratliff and Renee McConahy)

  • Using Okta OAuth with Avalon for SSO for students

  • Kyle, sysadmin, working on ingest from Internet Archive to Avalon - ~300,000 MP3 CDs. MSU Rovi collection in Internet Archive - these are metadata only; users cannot get audio files.

  • Future: 230,000 videos coming

  • They call it DML - Digital Media Lending. Allow students and faculty to check out digital media. Create digital copies of physical media so that media can be accessed via streaming, rather than physical lending.

  • controlled access to Vincent Voice Library, which is copyrighted material.

  • Allow non-MSU local community members to access collections.

  • Increase accessibility to these media items.

  • https://dml.lib.msu.edu

  • For signon, they allow MSU SSO or a local email/password for local accounts.

  • About 100 items loaded at this time.

  • Running on Avalon 8.0.1 and looks good so far.

  • They are running with CDL turned on for all items.

  • Their copyright materials will be only available to MSU community at the outset via Okta auth.

  • Through Okta, admins can assign access to Avalon (who can log into Avalon; ex: all students). When new student logs into Avalon, an account gets created for them. OmniAuth takes the auth from Okta and saves it in the Avalon db.

  • Implementation details

    • Fork of the main Avalon app

    • CI job that triggers a terraform deploy - now using OpenTofu as a drop-in replacement for terraform b/c it’s not free anymore

    • Use a terraform config that is basically the same as in the IU repository

    • Run the whole thing in AWS.

• UMD is working on shifting all their apps to AWS, including Avalon, by the end of May.

• Accessibility compliance needs and planning

  • What are other institutions planning?

  • What is needed in Avalon to support WCAG 2.1 by April 2026?

  • Avalon can support upload of transcripts and captions. User-facing pages have been or will be reviewed for WCAG 2.1 AA compliance (timelines could be an issue)

  • UMD has gone through a review and not too many accessibility issues. Plan to start working on upgrade next week. Have quite a bit of “legacy” content and not all will be made accessible at once. Working with accessibility folks on campus to do most priority stuff first. Other stuff we just don’t know how to do ex: describing a dance performance. Focus on materials that are put “on reserve” so know they are used for courses. Integrate with resource sharing department workflow. Using Adobe Premiere to generate transcripts.

  • IU is contemplating a (presumably optional) workflow in Avalon that does not allow post April 2026 materials to be published if they do not have a caption or transcript. UMD would potentially be interested in this as well.

  • UMD will likely use AWS Transcribe - they have had good luck with this in the past.

• Course reserve integration from last meeting (for Northwestern): at IU, we integrate with Canvas via LTI, but do not have a specific course reserves management system

  • UMD uses Ares; looking into Leganto

  • Northwestern uses Ares

  • NEC uses Neo - the school’s LMS

• Other agenda items?

Potential Future Agenda Items