Avalon Media System 7.8 Released

[Cameron, Jon Brandon]

The Avalon Media System team is proud to announce Avalon 7.8!

 

Avalon 7.8 includes a new component for searching transcripts within the transcript viewer, increased API functionality, and a variety of bug fixes and minor improvements.

 Search, Navigation, and UI Updates

• "Found in" text now appears in search results, indicating the number of matches for separate areas of the record: descriptive metadata, section metadata and transcript text
• Upgraded to Ramp 3.2, which includes a component for searching within documents in the transcript viewer with rich navigation and match highlighting
• IIIF Content Search service added at the canvas level
• Playback rate control: media playback speed can be decreased or increased with a widget in the media player
• Catalog searches return more quickly
• IIIF manifest URL added to the Share panel
• Embedded media player now uses Ramp

 

Other Major Changes and Updates

• Captions can be marked as transcript documents, allowing them to serve as both captions in the media player as well as a document within the transcript viewer
• The Avalon API now allows for CRUD operations for supplemental files, including caption and transcript files
• Batch ingest now accepts columns for captions and transcript files and metadata
• Transcript language can now be specified per file
• New configuration added to provide a link for direct download of derivatives through the UI
• The recordChangeDate field for media objects (a timestamp for the last descriptive metadata change) has been added to the Solr index as descMetadata_modified_dtsi
• "Has Transcript" and "Has Caption" facets added to the facets in search for admin and collection staff users
• File size limit for web upload changed to remove the 2 GB default
• Added setting for configuring alternative tempfile location when uploading large files from the web
• Bibliographic ID value added to the search index for instances where import is not performed

 

Documentation on upgrading to 7.8 can be found on the Upgrading Avalon 7.7 → 7.8 page on the Avalon wiki. 

Full release notes and the changelog for 7.8 are available at https://github.com/avalonmediasystem/avalon/releases. 

 

Potential Data Loss Issue for Supplemental Files in AWS Docker Installs

We have discovered a serious problem with storage of supplemental files in Avalon AWS Docker installs that are based on the avalon-terraform repository or the  aws_min branch of the avalon-docker repository. Although we have reached out directly to the institutions we are aware of that are using this configuration, we wanted to share this more broadly just in case we missed someone.

For installs in this environment, if the Docker container is torn down or restarted, any supplemental files will be lost, as they are stored in transient file space in the container rather than an S3 bucket. This can include captions, transcripts, and other supplemental files.

If you are running Avalon 7.2 or later in this AWS Docker environment and have uploaded captions, transcripts, or supplemental files, please back up those files immediately. Then reach out to us in the #avalon channel in the Samvera Slack workspace and we can help you get patched or upgraded to resolve this issue. If you are running this configuration without use of supplemental files, please do not upload any supplemental files, transcripts, or captions until you have your application patched or upgraded. More information about the underlying problem can be found at https://github.com/avalonmediasystem/avalon-docker/issues/77

Thanks,

Jon

 

—

Jon Cameron

Product Owner, Avalon Media System

Digital Media Service Manager,Indiana University Libraries

812-855-7665 / jonc...@indiana.edu