Henry Kissinger Project – Ingest Statistics

This is just a brief update to offer some ingest statistics related to the Henry Kissinger project. The digitized project will contain approximately 1,700,000 digital objects from approximately 12,800 folders.

The process of ingest includes both manual and automated processes. The Digital Library Programming group is responsible for the automated steps which basically include the creation of a Ladybird object and then publishing that object to Hydra. At this time, all objects are being ingested in a manner that prevents them from being exposed in the public Hydra interface (FindIT.library.yale.edu). The plan is to “turn on” the collection all at once, which is a better approach when a collection is very large and very complex. Otherwise, researchers may have a difficult time using the collection if materials were made available a little at a time, in sometimes what would seem like a random order.

As of Feb 16:

  • 339,041 – the number of objects ingested into Hydra
  • 4,266 – the number of folders ingested out of the approximate 12,800
  • 7 – the number of digital files that makeup an object in Hydra
  • 2,377,553 – the actual number of files ingested into Hydra
  • 792,655 – total objects ingested into Hydra
  • 5,548,585 – total number files currently in Hydra
  • 10.856 seconds – the average time it takes an object to ingest into Hydra

Something to consider with the last statistic, which is actually the one we focus on the most. At the current rate, time to ingest the entire collection is approximately 213 days. For each 1/10th of a second that this rate fluctuates, the completion time increases/decreases by roughly 31 hours. If ingest was to suddenly start taking 11.8 seconds, it would push the approximate completion time to 232 days.

Duoc UC, Chile, becomes the 27th Hydra Partner

(taken from the Hydra Partner List-serv)

[English version below]

Estamos encantados de anunciar que Duoc UC (http://www.duoc.cl), en Santiago de Chile, se ha convertido en el más reciente Hydra Socio formales, y nuestro primer socio en América Latina. Duoc ha estado trabajando con Hydra para construir la “Biblioteca Digital Patrimonial” (http://loncofilu.cl), un repositorio digital de planos arquitectónicos, fotografías, planes de restauración y documentos históricos relacionados con los edificios históricos más preciados de Chile, y que representa el trabajo producido por los estudiantes de la Escuela de Construcción Duoc UC. Para el 2015 están planeando el desarrollo de dos repositorios adicionales basados Hydra que se centrarán en la recogida de proyectos de títulos  de estudiantes y de audio y producciones visuales de la Escuela de Comunicación.

En su carta de intención, Duoc dice que se han comprometido no sólo a la construcción de más proyectos con Hydra, sino también para la construcción de una comunidad de Hydra en América Latina mediante la traducción de la documentación en talleres españoles y explicaciones por otras instituciones de América Latina interesados en la construcción de repositorios de Hydra.

Bienvenidos, Duoc UC!

We are delighted to announce that Duoc UC (http://www.duoc.cl), in Santiago, Chile, has become the latest formal Hydra partner, and our first partner institution in Latin America. Duoc has been working with Hydra to build the “Heritage Digital Library” (http://loncofilu.cl), a digital repository of architectural drawings, photographs, restoration plans and historical documents related to the most precious historic buildings in Chile, and representing work produced by the students of Duoc’s Faculty of Construction. In 2015 they are planning to develop two additional repositories based on Hydra that will focus on the collection of student thesis projects and audio and visual productions from their Faculty of Communication.

In their letter of intent, Duoc says they are committed not only to building more projects with Hydra, but also to building a Hydra community in Latin America through the translation of documentation into Spanish and offering workshops to other Latin American institutions interested in building Hydra repositories.

Welcome, Duoc UC!

ScholarSphere Conference at Yale University Library

Yale University Library and Yale ITS are pleased to sponsor a conference and public lecture on ScholarSphere, a software project developed at Penn State University, based on the same open-source Hydra/Fedora framework in use at YUL.

Yale University Library and ITS are investigating the possible adoption of this solution to enable Yale faculty and researchers to self-archive their own digital content in a managed, secure repository for controlled or open dissemination as well as for their own use. Our speakers will talk about the ScholarSphere project both from a technical perspective and as a service model. More information on the ScholarSphere website here.

Speakers:

Patricia Hswe, Digital Content Strategist and Head, ScholarSphere User Services at Penn State University
Daniel Coughlin, Ph.D. Candidate at Penn State University

via Yale University Library News: ScholarSphere Conference Archives.

Avalon Meeting Notes for Nov 24

We had a very productive meeting with three guests: Jon Dunn, Project Director, Indiana University; Mark Notess, Product Owner, Indiana University; Julie Rudder, Product Owner, Northwestern University.

The day started with an introduction to Avalon Media Systems in the Library Lecture Hall which included demonstrations of the work of Indiana and Northwestern who very recently released their first Avalon collections to the public. Powerpoint from the presentation is attached here: Yale Avalon Conference This lecture was video taped but sound is lacking, please contact michael.friscia@yale.edu for access.

Later in the day a smaller group convened to have a technical discussion about the future roadmap of Avalon. A recent poster that gives a very high level view can be seen here: RudderAvalon2. I am hoping to acquire a copy of the powerpoint presentation which has bullet lists of all the planned work that will go into version 3.2 through 4.0.

While we are still in the discussion stages of a project to bring Avalon up at Yale, two of the most important features for us include integration with Fedora 4 and possible integration of the backend transcoding processes into Sufia (Penn State has a version of Sufia called ScholarSphere). Our goal would be to integrate the two Hydra applications together so that audio and video files loaded into the self archiving product, Sufia, would take advantage of all the features of the Avalon Media System.

In addition, we discussed many topics including scaling Avalon so that it could transcode more than one file at a time, use RDF for describing complex relationships between multiple files/tracks and digital preservation.

 

 

Hydra Repository Now 3-Lock Data Compliant

The underlying storage infrastructure in use by Yale University Library’s Hydra repository is now 3-Lock data compliant.  Data and information at Yale is classified into three different tiers to categorize data security (more here).  3-Lock data can include things like Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, trade secrets, medical records, tax records, grades for assignments and courses, passport numbers, Veterans Administration data, and bank account numbers.  This upgrade is intended to meet the needs of units across the Library depositing material, and in particular units that are interested in the storage of digital personal papers that may contain sensitive content.  Thanks to Steve DeGroat and John Coleman of the Design & Quality Assurance team within Yale ITS Infrastructure Services.

Tufts University Becomes 25th Hydra Partner

Tufts University officially became the 25th Hydra partner on November 18, 2014. The full list of partners and Hydra adopters wishing to be publicly recognized may be viewed here: Hydra Partners.

In addition, I wanted to provide a link to the November Partner Phone call notes. Some highlights below:

  • The Hydra Steering group elected two new members: Jon Dunn, Indianna University and Michael Giarlo, Penn State University.
  • The Steering group will undertake a process to draft a set of bylaws for governance of the project given its rapid growth.
  • The Steering group is also beginning to look at contract services for banking and other legal activities such as trademark and intellectual property.
  • Significant expansion of Hydra adoption in Europe was reported as well as a successful Hydra UK event at the University of Hull.
  • Hydra had excellent presence and reception at DLF in Atlanta this past October.
  • DuraSpace conducted a Fedora 4 webinar which is now available online.
  • A proposal for formalizing the creation of Hydra special interest groups is near ratification.
  • The Hydra Archivists Working Group (HAWG) has reformed under the new leadership of Ben Goldman, Penn State University.
  • Stanford announced ArcLight as a formal project that is kicking off and seeking partnerships for planning and development. In short, ArcLight is an effort to build a Blacklight-based environment to support discovery and digital delivery of information in Archives. Which also includes integration with ArchivesSpace and EAD support.
  • Hydra expansion into South America is underway and several universities (wishing to remain anonymous at this time) are beginning Hydra development. Another major milestone is the work they are taking on to translate all of the Hydra documentation written in English into Spanish.

Fedora 4 development notes for November 2014

Fedora is used locally in a number of applications including our Hydra instance, Finding Aids Database, AMEEL and the Joel Sumner Smith collection. In our local instances we have been using versions of Fedora 3 since 2006. Fedora 3.8, to be released in December, will be the final release of the 3.x line with energy at that pointed shifted primarily to Fedora 4.

Fedora 4 consists of a complete refactoring of the fedora 3 code now built on top of the Modeshape and JCR repository APIs, with improvements in ease of installation, scaling, and RDF support. Below is a full list of features.

Yale contributes financially to the product as a bronze member and we also contribute to the programming efforts. Osman Din and Eric James, both in Digital Library Programming Services, actively participate in development. In addition, I sit on the Fedora Leadership Committee that handles the gathering of use cases, prioritization of features being programmed as well as budget planning.

Fedora 4.0 is now undergoing a cycle of beta releases to allow institutions to begin adopting it. On November 9th Fedora 4.0 Beta 4 was released again with an eye towards simple installation and support for performance and repository size. Fedora 4.1, to begin development in 2015, will focus on supporting the upgrade/migration process from Fedora 3.x. Some peers, including Penn State, have already begun to replace some of their Fedora 3 repositories with Fedora 4. We are also starting to think about how our migration strategies can dovetail with fedora 4.1 for our own adoption starting around the of summer of 2015.

With that little bit of background, I thought I would share the recent development notes. If you have questions about Fedora, do not hesitate to contact me (michael.friscia@yale.edu), Eric James (eric.james@yale.edu) or Osman Din (osman.din@yale.edu).

(note: Eric provided valuable editorial feedback for the above post)

======================================================

Release date: 9 November, 2014

 

We are proud to announce the fourth Beta release of Fedora 4. In the continuing effort to complete the Fedora 4 feature set, this Beta release is one of several leading up to the Fedora 4 release. Full release notes and downloads are available on the wiki: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Fedora+4.0+Beta+4+Release+Notes.

 

==============

Release Manager

==============

Andrew Woods (DuraSpace)

 

==========

Contributors

==========

—————————-

1) Sprint Developers

 

Adam Soroka (University of Virginia)

Benjamin Armintor (Columbia University)

Chris Beer (Stanford University)

Esme Cowles (University of California, San Diego)

Giulia Hill (University of California, Berkeley)

Jared Whiklo (University of Manitoba)

Jon Roby (University of Manitoba)

Kevin S. Clarke (University of California, Los Angeles)

Longshou Situ (University of California, San Diego)

Michael Durbin (University of Virginia)

Mohamed Mohideen Abdul Rasheed (University of Maryland)

Osman Din (Yale University)

 

————————————

2) Community Developers

 

Aaron Coburn (Amherst College)

Frank Asseg (FIZ Karlsruhe)

Nikhil Trivedi (Art Institute of Chicago)

 

=======

Features

=======

—————————–

1) Removed features

In the interest of producing a stable, well-tested release, the development team identified and removed a number of under-developed features that had not been sufficiently tested and documented. These features were not identified as high priorities by the community, but they may be re-introduced in later versions of Fedora 4 based on community feedback.

 

– Namespace [1] creation/deletion endpoint

– Locks endpoint

– Workspaces other than the ‘default’

– Admin internal search endpoints

– Policy-driven storage

– Batch operations in single request

– Auto-versioning configuration option

– Sitemaps endpoint

– Writable nodetypes endpoint

 

——————

2) REST API

The REST API is one of the core Fedora 4 components, and this release brings it more in line with the emerging W3C Linked Data Platform 1.0 [2] specification. An example of this is the new tombstone functionality [3]; URIs are not supposed to be reused, so deleting a resource leaves a tombstone in its place that serves as a notification that the resource has been deleted. Child nodes of deleted resources also leave tombstones. Other examples of LDP-related REST API changes include:

 

– Support for hashed URIs [4] as subjects and objects in triples.

– Binary and binary description model changed:

– From: binary description at /resource, and binary at /resource/fcr:content,

– To: binary description at /resource/fcr:metadata, and binary at /resource

– Labels are required when creating new versions of resources [5].

– Content-Disposition, Content-Length, Content-Type are now available on HEAD requests [6].

 

—————-

3) Ontology

The Fedora 4 ontology [7] was previously broken out into several different namespaces, but these have now been collapsed into the repository [8] namespace. Additionally, the oai-pmh [9] namespace has been added to the ontology.

 

———-

4) LDP

Fedora 4 provides native linked data functionality, primarily by conforming with the W3C Linked Data Platform 1.0 [10] specification. The LDP 1.0 test suite [11] is executed against the Fedora 4 codebase as a part of the standard build process, and changes are made as necessary to pass the tests. Additionally, integrations tests for real-world RDF assertions [12] have also been added to the codebase.

 

Recent changes to suport LDP include:

 

– When serializing to RDF, child resources are included in responses [13], versus having to traverse auto-generated intermediate nodes.

– All RDF types on properties are now supported [14].

– Prefer/Preference-Applied headers have been updated [15] to match the latest requirements [16].

– RDF language types are now supported [17].

– The full range of LDP containers [18] are now supported

– Changed terminology from:

– object -> container

– datastream -> non-rdf-source-description

– Replaced relationships from:

– hasContent/isContentOf, to:

– describes/isDescribedBy

 

—————————

5) External modules

In additional to the core Fedora 4 codebase, there are a number of supported external modules that offer useful extensions to the repository. Two such modules are being introduced in the Fedora 4.0 Beta 4 release: Fedora 4 OAI Provider [19] and Fcrepo Camel [20].

 

The Fedora 4 OAI Provider implements the Open Archives Protocol Version 2.0 [21] using Fedora 4 as the backend. It exposes an endpoint at  /oai  which accepts OAI conforming HTTP requests. A Fedora resources containing set information can be created then exposed at the module’s endpoint which accepts HTTP POST requests containing serialized Set information adhering to the OAI schema.

 

Fcrepo Camel provides access to an external Fedora 4 Containers API [22] for use with Apache Camel [23]. Camel is middleware for writing message-based integrations, so this component can be used to connect Fedora 4 an extensive number of external systems [24], including Solr and Fuseki. This functionality is similar to that of the Fcrepo Message Consumer [25], except it is based on a well-maintained Apache project rather than being custom Fedora 4 code. Therefore, this component is likely to replace the Message Consumer in the future, though the Message Consumer will still be part of the Fedora 4.0 release.

 

————————

6) Admin Console

The administrative console provides a simple HTML user interface for viewing the contents of the repository and accessing functionality provided by the REST API. This release introduces support for custom velocity templates [26] based on the hierarchy of mixing types. Now, if you create a new mixin type, the templates to be used in the admin console will include the resource’s primary type, mixin types, and parent types thereof.

 

—————–

7) Projection

The projection [27] (also known as federation) feature allows Fedora 4 to connect to external storage media via a pluggable connector framework. A read-only filesystem connector is included with this release.

 

Additionally, Fedora 4 now has standardized support for externally-referenced content [28].

 

—————————

8) Java client library

The Java Client Library [29] is an example of a module that was conceived by Fedora community members who recognized a common need and rallied to design [30] and implement the functionality. This release includes an improvement to list the children of a resource [31] in the client library.

 

———–

9) Build

A key component under the covers of Fedora 4 is ModeShape [32], one that the Fedora 4 project tracks closely. Fedora 4.0 Beta 4 includes an upgrade to the production version of ModeShape 4.0.0 [33].

 

Fedora 4 comes with built-in profiling machinery that keeps track of how many times specific services have been requested, how long each request takes to be serviced, etc. These metrics can be visualized using Graphite [34]. Because Graphite can be difficult to setup and configure [35], this release includes a Packer.io build [36] which completely automates the process of standing up a Graphite server.

 

Additionally, the pluggable role-based [37] and XACML [38] authorization modules have been pre-packaged into fcrepo-webapp-plus [39]. This project builds custom-configured fcrepo4 webapp war files that include extra dependencies and configuration options.

 

————————-

10) Test Coverage

Unit and Integration test coverage [40] is a vital factor in maintaining a healthy code base. The following are the code coverage statistics for this release.

 

– Unit tests: 66.2%

– Integration tests: 69.4%

– Overall coverage: 82.5%

 

=========

References

=========

[1]  https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Glossary#Glossary-namespaceNamespace

[2]  http://www.w3.org/TR/ldp/

[3]  https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/RESTful+HTTP+API#RESTfulHTTPAPI-RedDELETEDeletearesource

[4]  https://github.com/fcrepo4/fcrepo4/commit/5c30c743bb05ef627acc90f4b037b118c7d9de9c

[5]  https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Versioning#RESTfulHTTPAPI-Versioning-BluePOSTCreateanewversionofanobject

[6]  https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/RESTful+HTTP+API+-+Containers

[7]  https://github.com/fcrepo4/ontology

[8]  http://fedora.info/definitions/v4/repository

[9]  https://github.com/fcrepo4/ontology/blob/master/oai-pmh.rdf

[10] http://www.w3.org/TR/ldp/

[11] http://w3c.github.io/ldp-testsuite/

[12] https://github.com/fcrepo4/fcrepo4/pull/579

[13] https://github.com/fcrepo4/fcrepo4/pull/542

[14] https://github.com/fcrepo4/fcrepo4/pull/587

[15] https://github.com/fcrepo4/fcrepo4/pull/451

[16] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7240#page-7

[17] https://github.com/fcrepo4/fcrepo4/pull/586

[18] https://github.com/fcrepo4/fcrepo4/pull/594

[19] https://github.com/fcrepo4-labs/fcrepo4-oaiprovider

[20] https://github.com/fcrepo4-labs/fcrepo-camel

[21] http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html

[22] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/RESTful+HTTP+API+-+Containers

[23] https://camel.apache.org

[24] https://camel.apache.org/components.html

[25] https://github.com/fcrepo4/fcrepo-message-consumer

[26] https://velocity.apache.org/engine/releases/velocity-1.5/user-guide.html#velocity_template_language_vtl:_an_introduction

[27] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Federation

[28] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/RESTful+HTTP+API+-+Containers#RESTfulHTTPAPI-Containers-external-content

[29] https://github.com/fcrepo4-labs/fcrepo4-client

[30] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Design+-+Java+Client+Library

[31] https://github.com/fcrepo4-labs/fcrepo4-client/pull/12

[32] http://modeshape.jboss.org

[33] http://modeshape.jboss.org/downloads/downloads4-0-0-final.html

[34] http://graphite.wikidot.com

[35] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Setup+a+Graphite+instance

[36] https://github.com/fcrepo4-labs/fcrepo4-packer-graphite

[37] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/Basic+Role-based+Authorization+Delegate

[38] https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/FF/XACML+Authorization+Delegate

[39] https://github.com/fcrepo4-labs/fcrepo-webapp-plus

[40] http://sonar.fcrepo.org/dashboard/index/1

New Staff in the Digital Library Programming Services Department

I’d like to introduce everyone to Tracy MacMath, she joined us this week as a User Interface Programmer who will be working primarily on Hydra, Blacklight, Ladybird and other Hydra related applications we adopt such as Avalon. Previously Tracy worked as a User Experience Producer at Gartner and received a Masters of Science in Interactive Communications from Quinnipiac University.

In addition to introducing Tracy, I thought it might help to offer some quick bios for the whole team.

Michael Friscia – Manager, Digital Library Programming Services
michael.friscia@yale.edu 
I arrived at Yale in 2007 and worked primarily supporting workstations, ILLiad and programming on various projects for the LSF, Map Department and the wide range of Digital Library interfaces. Since then Library IT has changed quite a bit and I now manage the group that is primarily responsible for working with the Hydra implementation in support of a number of grant funded projects including Arcadia, NEH and the Dr. Henry Kissinger Papers. I started programming early, my first computer arriving for Christmas in 1979 and recently celebrated 30 years of programming C++ applications though still enjoy programming in Algol and Basic on a variety of vintage computers in a collection that spans from 1964 to 1995 with some overflow in my office that I crank up from time to time. I enjoy writing software of all types but spend my free time working on several open source video game and game emulation projects.

Eric James, Senior Programmer Analyst
eric.james@yale.edu
My official title is Programmer Analyst, Library IT.  I was hired 7 years ago to work on a digital repository service that became the current YaleFindingAidDatabase, and a grant project A MiddleEasternElectronicLibrary (AMEEL) that was one of the earliest adopters of a software stack for the submission, achiving and dissemination of digital material.  This work has matured over the years and is now basically taken the form of Hydra, an interinstitutional project with these same goals bringing together such components as fedora, solr, and mysql.  I am a programmer on these these projects (php, java and ruby/RAILS) and have been involved in various teams such as the Digitization Task Force, the YFAD Coordinating Committee, the Digital Repository Archiving Committee, and most recently the Kissinger Project working to coordinate technology with our strategic plans.  I have participated as a programmer in several sprints for the fedora 4 project (the future underlying repository of most of our solutions) and in the development and use of the hydra stack, and am involved in working groups related to these projects.  Throughout these projects I have worked with software project management tools such at GIT, sharepoint, wrike, basecamp, pivotal tracker, jira, confluence wikis, and classesv2.  I have been involved in several conferences including participation as presenter, and in lightning talks and poster sessions at Open Repositories, code4lib, hydraConnect and the DigitalLibraryFoundation.

Osman Din, Senior Programmer Analyst
osman.din@yale.edu
I got into software engineering, and programming in particular, due to my background in Computer Science. My current career focus is on developing back-end large-scale services for digital content management and publishing, as well as writing web applications and tools that aid in this enterprise. Besides other assignments or projects that I participate in, the bulk of my time is dedicated currently to two major projects, Ladybird 2 and Fedora 4.  Ladybird 2 is a Java application for managing the publishing and discovery of digital content to repositories (such as Fedora) and user-facing web applications (such as the Hydra interfaces). I’m the lead developer for this project. The code is written via IntelliJ, lives in GitHub (eventually, it will become an open source project), and is managed via Jenkins for continuous integration. For Fedora 4, which is an open source repository system with about 30 developers, I keep the code that I write in a fork on GitHub, and submit it to the Fedora 4 project team lead in the form of GitHub pull requests. The code is tested automatically for integration and fitness via Travis and Jenkins; the documentation for new functionality is kept up-to-date in Confluence; the status updates for features and bugs are recorded in Pivotal Tracker. My favorite tools for software design and programming are IntelliJ, bash, Eclipse (for proprietary frameworks), Virtual Box, Git, Jenkins and LucidChart.

Lakeisha Robinson, Programmer Analyst
lakeisha.robinson@yale.edu
How I began a career in programming:
Immediately following college is when I started my career at IBM. It was there at IBM, where I designed and coded programs in C/Assembly, when I realized how much I loved programming. I had a hardware background in Electrical Engineering and didn’t have a strong programming background. When I left that job I decided to pursue a degree in Computer Science to strengthen my programming skills. I started my career here at Yale University 2 years ago. I’ve participated on many exciting projects including Quicksearch, Kissinger, Ladybird and Findit.

Projects I’ve worked on and am currently working on:
I am the technical lead on the Blacklight based Quicksearch project. Quicksearch is where we are unifying our Orbis and Morris records to be searched in the same interface. I am responsible for many of the code changes for the setup, ingest and interface functionality. I am also working on the Kissinger project where I am responsible for the discovery of Kissinger material. I’m also one of the original contributors to our Blacklight based digital ‘Findit’ interface where I was responsible for the creation of the MODS formatted XML document retrieving data from the Ladybird database. I also was responsible for the object discovery in the interface and I continue to do ongoing work on enhancement.

Anju Meenattoor, Programmer Analyst
anju.meenattoor@yale.edu
I have been working in IT for 8 years focusing mainly on web development and C#.Net applications. I started my career at Yale in January 2014 and am current working on Dr. Henry Kissinger project. Since January, I have been involved in developing applications for importing Kissinger MODS files, automate Kissinger digital file import into ladybird, Manual QC tool for checking Kissinger digital files and Ladybird maintenance.

Tracy MacMath, User Interface Programmer
tracy.macmath@yale.edu
I’m the newest member of the Digital Library Programming team. As a User Interface Programmer, I’ll be working primarily on our implementation of Hydra, Blacklight, Ladybird and other Hydra-related applications we adopt in the future (such as Avalon). Before coming to Yale, I was a User Experience Producer for the Marketing group at Gartner in Stamford. I received a Master of Science in Interactive Communications from Quinnipiac University, and an undergraduate degree in music (drums and percussion).

FindIt, QuickSearch Security Design Review Completed

"data.path Ryoji.Ikeda - 4" by r2hox is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
“data.path Ryoji.Ikeda – 4” by r2hox is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Yale University Library FindIt and QuickSearch services have completed a Security Design Review (SDR) by the Information Security Office of Yale ITS.  These systems use the Hydra repository solution as the underlying technology stack.  The SDR process is used to provide recommendations for building, improving, or reengineering services to meet University policies, industry best practices, laws, and regulation requirements.  Thanks to Bob Rice for evaluating and implementing the recommendations and Tom Castiello and Marcus Aden from the Information Security Office for their insight and participation.

Avalon Media Systems

Some preliminary work has been going on in the Digital Library Programming group to investigate Avalon for use in delivering audio and video content from our Hydra repository. Avalon is an open source software package that was developed by the Hydra partners: Indiana University and Northwestern University. We are considering adopting it for some of our audio/video needs as we consider ingesting audio and video into our Hydra repository.

In the video you will see an instance of Avalon that I have running on a virtual server on my computer. To access, I am using a web browser pointing to the virtual server, the URL only works from my computer. The only customization made to the software was to include a small Yale Library logo in the upper left, otherwise the software is “out of the box” and is bundled with an open source media streaming server. The content in this test instance is delivered as part of the “trial version” of the software so that you can see how it works without investing a lot of time.

The video is just under two minutes and demonstrates browsing to a video and showing playback. I demonstrate some of the basic playback controls including full screen. I then show how the video can be embedded on other web pages for sharing the content. Lastly I demonstrate the most basic type of content restriction where I set the requirement that you must be logged into Avalon in order to view the video. I then reload the web page that I embedded the video onto to demonstrate that I am now required to login. After logging in, the video begins to playback.

The video below is best viewed in full screen, it does not require sound but if you do have speaker or headphones, you will hear the music while the video is playing. (youtube link if the video below does not work)

AvalonSample1