The document summarizes Stanford University Libraries' (SUL's) media preservation program and their plans to implement the Avalon digital repository system. The objectives of SUL's media preservation program are to maintain long-term access to at-risk materials, support collection development, promote use of media in teaching and research, and integrate with their digital library services and technology. SUL evaluated Avalon and found that it meets their basic functional, technical, and philosophical needs. They plan to hire a Media Infrastructure Engineer to lead the design, installation, and integration of Avalon over a two-year project starting in January 2015.

1. Avalon
at Stanford University Libraries
Bess Sadler – Manager for Application Development
Hannah Frost - Services Manager
Stanford Digital Repository
Stanford Media Preservation Lab
DLF Atlanta October 28, 2014

2. Objectives of SUL’s Media Preservation Program
• Maintain long-term access to at-risk materials
through high-quality reformatting
– In-house whenever possible
• Support collection development
• Promote use of media in teaching and research
• Integrate with digital library
– Services
– Technology
• Develop expertise, best practices, community

3. Michael in Video Lab

4. Objectives of SUL’s Media Preservation Program
Maintain long-term access to at-risk materials
through high-quality reformatting
Support collection development
Promote use of media in teaching and research
Integrate with digital library
✔ Services
☐ Technology: discovery and delivery
Develop expertise, best practices, community
✔
✔
☐
☐
✔

5. Patron Digitization Requests: Rising
800
700
600
500
400
300
200
100
0
2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014
69 Items
requested in
Sept 2014
alone!

6. Top Collection Websites: Media

7. Media Access Working Group
Recommendations
• Augment systems and tools that
– Reduce ingest backlog
– Promote discovery and use
• Wrangle the rights
• Gather more metrics to inform future
decision making

8. Keys to a Solution at Stanford Libraries
• Technology
– Open source
– Open minded and flexible
• Community
– Vibrant
– Digital library-centric

9. Avalon at Stanford
• Meets all our basic needs
– Functional, technical, philosophical
– Tested by Media Access Working Group
– Supported by Management
• Hiring a Media Infrastructure Engineer
– Funded through a 2-year collection project
– Work starts ASAP!

10. What are your main use cases for
Avalon?
• Deposit of media produced by (with examples)
– Students: documentary film program, engineering and product
design course projects,
– Faculty: Observational research, fine arts performances,
– Online learning initiatives: lectures, course reserves
– Administration: Office of Development, Oral history program,
campus events
• Delivery of reformatted media produced in digital
preservation workflows
– Systematic reformatting of rare/unique archival and commercial
items at SMPL (13,000 and counting)
– Satisfying requests by researchers (remote and on-site) for
online access to collection material

11. What other media solutions do you
have in place that Avalon replaces or
complements?
• Will replace existing streaming infrastructure
(wowza) that is outdated and not integrated with
SUL’s digital library discovery environment
• Will complement outsourced CDN services used
for boutique collection web sites
• Will complement current Drupal infrastructure
and future Spotlight exhibits, where curators and
other librarians promote media collections and
services through web sites
• May play into course management system
currently in transition (from Sakai to Canvas)

12. Where are you on your
implementation or evaluation?
• Evaluation is complete, including a test
installation of Avalon Release 2 in Fall 2013
• Currently interviewing for Media
Infrastructure Engineer to lead the design,
installation, and integration (2 year project
starting approx. January 2015)

13. What staff resources have been
necessary to implement Avalon at
your institution?
• Parts of
– Product owner
– Service manager
– Software developer
– Infrastructure engineer
– System / Storage Administrator
– DevOps Systems configuration

14. What features do you most need
that are not currently in Avalon?
• Support for Wowza streaming server
• Support for Open Annotations
• Support for transcripts/captions: synchronization and
full-text search
• Support for PBCore metadata (v2)
• Integration with Fedora 4
• IP-based access control
• Hooks for capturing special license terms
• Re-architecting Avalon as components that can be built
into a digital library ecosystem, instead of a tightly
integrated out of the box solution

15. What would you like the Avalon
community to look like in the future?
• A healthy cadre of core
developers/maintainers; the media space is
always evolving and Avalon will need to keep
up
• A vibrant, connected user community that
reflects the requirements of scholars who use
media in research and teaching
• Vendors who can help small installations with
local implementation or offer hosted services

16. Thank you!
Bess Sadler
bess@stanford.edu
Hannah Frost
hfrost@stanford.edu