Aviary November 2025 News

Sarah Lawrence College manages a
significant donation of restricted videos

Mid-Atlantic Regional Moving Image Archive (MARMIA) enhances discoverability of the WJZ-TV collection 

Upcoming Webinars

Achieving Accessibility Goals in Aviary: Transcripts, Translations, Captions, and Audio Description
December 11, 3:00pm EDT
Join us for this informative webinar to learn how Aviary’s integrated features can help your organization achieve its accessibility goals and deliver an enhanced user experience. We'll walk through the essential tools in Aviary that ensure your audiovisual (AV) collections are accessible to all:

• Transcripts and Captions: Discover how Aviary’s automated transcription integrations (including WhisperX, AssemblyAI, and Trint) streamline the creation of accurate transcripts and synchronized captions. We’ll highlight ways to save on costs with bulk purchases and demonstrate the user-friendly editor for easy transcript review and editing.
• Translations: See how Aviary supports transcript translations, empowering you to share your collections with a broader, global audience.
• Audio Description: Learn the fundamentals of audio description and how to add descriptive tracks to your AV resources—making visual content accessible for users who are visually impaired.

By taking advantage of these features, your organization can confidently meet accessibility requirements, while making all archived content fully searchable and discoverable for every user.

Introducing Collections in Aviary
January 15, 3:00pm EDT
This webinar introduces the fundamental concept of Collections within the Aviary platform and explains their role in organizing, presenting, and controlling access to your audiovisual archives. The session will cover:

• Organizational Structure: How Collections serve as the primary organizational container for grouping related resources.
• User Experience: How Collections provide a logical and attractive browsing experience for patrons, allowing them to easily explore different thematic areas or projects within your repository.
• Metadata Management: How Collections help streamline metadata application and consistency across large groups of resources.
• Access Control: The importance of Collections in managing and applying granular access controls and permissions, ensuring the right users can view restricted content.

This webinar is essential for understanding how to structure your archive efficiently on the Aviary platform. 

Introducing Playlists in Aviary
February 12, 3:00pm EST
This webinar introduces the practical use of Playlists within the Aviary platform, demonstrating how they enable users to curate and share specific sequences of archival content. The session covers:

• Curatorial Storytelling: How Playlists allow staff or researchers to select specific clips and resources to build narrative sequences, research sets, or thematic presentations.
• Segmenting Resources: Playlists make it easy to utilize specific segments of larger audiovisual files (like pulling key interview moments from a multi-hour recording) without altering the original resource.
• Teaching and Research: Playlists are an essential tool for creating structured viewing lists for classrooms, exhibits, or focused research projects, enhancing the pedagogical value of your archive.
• Public Sharing: How to easily share curated Playlists publicly, providing users with a guided experience through your collections.

Aviary Community of Practice

The Aviary Community of Practice is where users and developers come together to share ideas, collaborate, and shape the future of the platform. Through regular community calls every other month, members exchange best practices, spark partnerships, and provide input that helps Aviary grow with its users’ needs.

Please contact co-chairs Sean Luyk and Jonathan Manton for more information about joining the Community of Practice.

Aviary Customers in the News

Vanderbilt Library provides access to political history in Aviary
Vanderbilt University’s Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries recently completed a long-term digitization project of the Lamar Alexander Papers collection, which contains materials about the former Governor of Tennessee, Senator, and Secretary of Education. The Special Collections and University Archives is using Aviary to provide access to the collection's digitized audiovisual materials. With Aviary’s permissions and access management features, and by creating digital objects in ArchivesSpace that link users from the finding aid to resources in Aviary, the archive ensures researchers can easily discover and search the collection's audiovisual materials, while managing access to its restricted content.