- News and Events
- Samvera Community Newsletter September 2024 - Community Sprints, Regional Meetings, and More
Samvera Community Newsletter September 2024 - Community Sprints, Regional Meetings, and More
In this issue:
Volunteers required for upcoming Hyrax Community Sprints
A new home for the Samvera Development Knowledge Base, and new Documentation Interest Group
Avalon Media System 7.8 Released
Samvera Regional Meetings
Fedora Virtual Showcase October 1-3, 2024
In case you missed it: News and job listings
Upcoming Working and Interest Group Calls
1 – Volunteers required for upcoming Hyrax Community Sprints
Technologists at all levels are invited to sign up to contribute during two upcoming Hyrax Community Sprints. The Maintenance Working Group has outlined the work for these sprints, and all of the work is critical to ensure all Hyrax and Hyku users start 2025 with critical maintenance and accessibility tasks completed, so that Product Owners can plan for feature and maintenance priorities next year.
Please sign up to join for some or all of the sprints. New and experienced developers, system administrators, and QA testers are all welcome and needed.
Sprint for Dependencies: Updates for Bootstrap and Rails, September 30th - October 11th, 2024
Sprint for Accessibility: addressing documented issues to reach WCAG 2.0 AA, October 28th - November 8th, 2024
2 – A new home for the Samvera Development Knowledge Base, and new Documentation Interest Group
The Samvera Developer Knowledge Base originally found at samvera.github.io has moved to a new home on the Samvera wiki.
If you’re interested in identifying and describing documentation needs for any part of the community, please add your name to the Documentation Interest Group charter.
The Developer Onboarding Working Group identified that the samvera.github.io documentation site was out of date and infrequently updated. Working Group members spoke to other Samvera working and interest groups and at weekly Tech calls to identify community use of the documentation, what was important and what was missing, and how users wanted to interact with this kind of information. The Working Group concluded that this information would be easier to find and to update if it were moved to the Samvera Wiki.
The Developer Onboarding Working Group has organized and consolidated information for developers into the following locations:
Samvera Development Knowledge Base on the Samvera wiki: This wiki section includes information about community contribution, metadata information, and other orientation information related to Samvera technologies that was previously found at samvera.github.io.
Software-specific documentation on GitHub: Each component and platform in the Samvera GitHub organization has its own documentation in a README, a Github project based wiki, or both. For example, the working group reviewed and updated the Hyrax README and Hyrax GitHub wiki.
Avalon Media System wiki: additional developer documentation for Avalon is on the Avalon Media System wiki.
The Developer Onboarding Working Group has sunset and proposed a charter for a Documentation Interest Group. This Interest Group will identify, discuss, and share documentation needs for any tools or platforms in the Samvera Community. Documentation can be for anyone who is looking to install, manage, deposit, update, etc. across all platforms.
This group isn’t expected to create all documentation, but will help prioritize and create issues for documentation to be included as part of regular software maintenance.
If you’re interested in changing or improving documentation for any part of the community, please add your name to the Interest Group charter and join the monthly meeting,
A huge thank you to Julie Hardesty and Kiah Stroud for their hard work on the Developer Onboarding Working Group over the past year!
3 – Avalon Media System 7.8 Released
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.
4 – Samvera Regional Meetings
It’s not too late to register for three of this year’s Samvera Regional Meetings, all of which are free to attend and which are taking the place of Samvera Connect this year. Our 2025 Samvera Connect will be in October 2025 in Mexico City.
The Midwest Regional Meeting is set for September 25th - 26th in Indianapolis, IN
Register for the West Coast Regional Meeting in Portland, OR, October 9th - 10th
Register for the Northeast Regional Meeting at Princeton University, October 13th -14th
Register for the Samvera Europe meeting at Oxford University on October 22nd
Watch for details about a Virtual Samvera Community meeting in early December to share information from the regional meetings, hear the latest on Samvera governance, and start planning initiatives for 2025.
5 – Fedora Virtual Showcase October 1-3, 2024
The Virtual Fedora Showcase is taking place October 1-3, 2024 online. Several Samvera technology users will be presenting.
The Schedule of Events can be found on the Fedora wiki, along with other important information about registration. The event is entirely FREE and all levels of Fedora users are encouraged to attend.
6 – In case you missed it: News and job listings
As part of the Sustaining the Hyku Repository Platform IMLS grant, our team is researching previous practices in open source collaboration, and we'd love some community feedback! We are aware of It Takes a Village: Open Source Software Sustainability and Community Cultivation: A Field Guide. Are there other open-source community-building resources/tools? What are some successful models for open source collaboration to look at? You can reply here or email me at amanda@palni.edu. Thanks!
The Northeast Institutional Repository Day 2024 (NIRD24) Program Committee is pleased to issue its Call for Proposals for the sixth annual Northeast Institutional Repository Day, a free event that brings together those in the Northeast (and beyond!) who manage or are interested in institutional repositories, digital collections, and digital preservation. The submission deadline is September 30th.
Job listing: Director of Copyright & Scholarly Communication Services at the University of Virginia
Job listing: Metadata Specialist at The Getty Conservation Institute
7 – Upcoming Working and Interest Group meeting calls
See all Samvera calls, meetings, and events on the Samvera Public Calendar
Samvera Metadata Interest Group - next meeting is Tuesday, September 24th at 2PM ET/11AM PT – Add the Metadata Interest Group meetings to your calendar
Hyrax Fedora 6 Working Group - next meeting is Friday, September 27th at 9AM ET– Add the Hyrax Fedora 6 Working Group meetings to your calendar
Hyku Interest Group - next meeting is Thursday, October 3rd at 11:30AM ET/8:30AM PT – Add the Hyku Interest Group meetings to your calendar
Hyrax Interest Group - next meeting is Wednesday, October 9th at 11:30AM ET/8:30AM PT – Add the Hyrax Interest Group meetings to your calendar
Documentation Interest Group - next meeting is Tuesday, October 15th at 2:30PM ET/11:30AM PT – Add the Documentation Interest Group meetings to your calendar
Outreach & Engagement Working Group - next meeting is Wednesday, October 16th at 11AM ET/8AM PT – Add the Outreach & Engagement Working Group meetings to your calendar
Avalon User Roundtable - next meeting is Monday, October 21st at 1PM ET/10AM PT – Add the Avalon User Roundtable meetings to your calendar
Repository Management Interest Group - each month’s meeting is scheduled by a vote in the #repository-management channel on Slack
Accessibility Interest Group - please join the charter to be invited to the first group meeting
Weekly Samvera Tech call - all are welcome to the weekly call on Wednesdays at 12PM ET/9AM PT to discuss technical issues, documentation requests, and open pull requests. Add the weekly Samvera Tech call to your calendar
Monthly Samvera Partners call - all staff of Samvera Partner institutions are welcome to join the monthly call for discussion, demos, updates, and information about Samvera governance. Add the monthly Partner call to your calendar