Evviva Weinraub
Associate University Librarian for Digital Strategies
Northwestern University
John Herbert
Director of Digital Programs
Lyrasis
Carl Grant
Associate Dean, Knowledge Services & Chief Technology Officer
University of Oklahoma
Avalon Media System is an open source system, based on Fedora and Hydra repository technologies, that enables libraries and archives to more easily provide online access to digitized and born-digital audio and video collections for purposes of teaching, learning, and research. Now in its sixth major release, Avalon has been co-developed by the libraries at Indiana University Bloomington and Northwestern University, with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. One of the deliverables of the recent Mellon grant was to make it possible to run Avalon as a subscription software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. As part of our most recent IMLS grant, we were able to partner with LYRASIS to run a pilot project with nine partner institutions that spanned a diverse range of use cases and institution types. The partner organizations included in the pilot were: Emerson College, Oberlin College, the University of Houston, the University of Oklahoma, the University of the Arts, DC Public Library, Houston Public Library, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Tennessee Chattanooga. In addition, Northwestern University has been running its local instances of Avalon on Amazon Web Services since August 2017. This panel discussion will explore various aspects of the pilot, including an overview of pilot partner use cases, what went well and challenges encountered with pilot testing, and what is needed to make Avalon work for institutions interested in purchasing Avalon as a SaaS going forward. Additionally, the panel will discuss the lessons learned from the teams who have deployed the software both locally and in the cloud, share thoughts on how to organize the management of Avalon in the SaaS space, and summarize the real costs of running Avalon locally and in several cloud-based hosted environments.