Meeting Time

Monday, July 21, at 1 PM Eastern

Attendees

• Emily Lynema (IU)

• Jon Cameron (IU)

• Chris Colvard (IU)

• Kee-Young Moon (UMD)

• Mark Baggett (Texas A&M)

• Edgar Garcia (Northwestern)

• Joan Lindsay (MSU)

• David Venckus (Northwestern)

• Marek Babala (Northwestern)

• Michael North (Northwestern)

• Kyle Ratliff (MSU)

• James Bottino (Northwestern)

Zoom Link

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

Agenda/Notes

• Introductions

• Update on next release

  • Beginning regression testing for 8.1 next week-ish

  • Expect a release in August.

• Emily’s last day at IU will be July 23. Moving to Director, Design & Discovery at the University of Michigan Library.

  • Jon Cameron will be spearheading these meetings going forward.

• AWS - moving from Elastic Transcoder to Media Convert

  • Elastic Transcoder will stop working November 13

  • Avalon uses active-encode gem that provides an API to transcoding services. At IU, we mostly ffmpeg for transcoding; on our demo site in AWS we use Elastic Transcode.

  • Jonathan Rochkind has already built a Media Convert adapter for active-encode.

  • Need to make that adapter work on Avalon side plus any configuration in AWS needed.

  • Will this require an Avalon release?

    • Could put out a release of active-encode gem and have users update their gem in Avalon and upgrade configuration

    • For those running terraform, probably some changes to terraform and applying that.

  • MSU: interested in using ffmpeg on an EC2 instance. Think that will be cheaper than using Elastic Transcode / Media Convert. This would likely involve some changes to the terraform infrastructure. MSU running 8.0.1, so could update to an 8.1.1 easily, but also fine with just updating a gem.

    • Chris: Media Convert is supposed to be cheaper than Elastic Transcode, but maybe not if you are processing tons of content and don’t mind long wait times.

  • Northwestern: planning to run current version, but think they just upgraded to 7.8. Plan to stick with 7.8 for awhile before they try to manage the Fedora 4 to Fedora 6 migration. At least a year out.

    • They are definitely using Elastic Transcode. Could probably handle a new release of active-encode gem that they pull into the project.

  • UMD just finished upgrading to 7.8 and don’t plan to upgrade to 8.0 – not sure when that would happen.

    • UMD just moved infrastructure to AWS; not sure whether they are using Elastic Transcode.

  • IU could put out an 8.1.1 release with a new version of active-encode, but would that help?

• UMD asked about LTI 1.3 support last meeting

  • Tentatively on the schedule for 8.3 release, which would hopefully be summer 2026.

  • Would Avalon need to support both LTI 1.1 and LTI 1.3?

    • UMD is currently using 1.1 to integrate with campus LMS

    • Want a custom Atlas Ares add-on using LTI 1.3.

    • Might possibly need LTI 1.1 and 1.3 to maintain both those integrations.

    • the Atlas Area add-on is currently on-hold and don’t know when they might come back up.

  • Can we schedule a time for UMD to demo their course reserve workflows once up and running?

    • currently they are upgrading to 7.8, so they will be doing soft launch / pilot testing in fall 2025. Real launch in spring 2026.

• Interest in using Avalon 8.x with Fedora 4.

  • The gap between Fedora 4 and Fedora 6 isn’t super large in terms of how they interact with Avalon, but there were some changes. IU has not tested if those changes were breaking - would need to try spinning up on Fedora 4 and see what breaks.

  • Might have to add a “Fedora 4” setting in config and add logic to handle specific bugs.

  • For some institutions, Avalon is part of a larger Fedora 4 repo that’s not ready to migrate.

  • Texas A&M: they are stuck on Fedora 4 for awhile, but are concerned about WCAG requirements.

    • As of 7.8, SiteImprove was used to verify accessibility across the search/search results/media object view page, and we did additional accessibility testing on Ramp, which presents a lot of the components on the media object page. 7.8 also allows ingest of captions and transcripts.

    • Could try to use a newer version of Ramp with an older version of Avalon, but would not be able to take advantage of new info Avalon provides in the IIIF manifest (like audio descriptions) and it’s possible the props used to instantiate Ramp might have changed and older version of Avalon might not supply them.

  • If institutions really need to run Avalon 8.x on Fedora 4, might be able to “wind back” some of the Fedora 6 changes. But that might not be compatible for the long run.

  • IU could work with an institution that was interested in digging in and testing 8.x versions of Avalon with Fedora 4, but not interested in pursuing that on our own.

  • Follow up on #avalon slack channel to discuss further.

• Standing agenda item: accessibility compliance needs and planning - updates

  • 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)

  • IU plans a (presumably optional per site configuration) workflow in Avalon that does not allow post April 2026 materials to be published if they do not have a caption or transcript.

  • NEW: Avalon and Ramp will be investigating how to support audio description when available for media items. Aiming to accomplish this via vtt files with descriptions

  • NEW: Hope to build an integration based on Active Encode to allow collection managers to request a machine-generated caption/transcript for a post April 2026 item.

  • Other needs for institutions to support WCAG 2.1 by April 2026

• Other agenda items?

Potential Future Agenda Items

• LTI integration and course reserve workflows - demo of UMD for course reserves

  • Potentially sometime during fall 2025 pilot