Vision
Cultural heritage audiovisual content is readily accessible, navigable, and secure.
About the platform
Welcome to Aviary
A hosted platform to discover and navigate audiovisual content. For researchers seeking specific resources, organizations enhancing discoverability, and users enriching content online — Aviary offers advanced tools to explore, describe, and search audio and video.
§ 01 — Mission
Why Aviary exists
Mission
To empower cultural heritage institutions to easily organize, curate, describe, and provide dynamic secure online access to their valuable and underutilized audiovisual collections.
§ 02 — Content
What Content is Aviary for?
Built for Every Voice and Every Record. Aviary is the premier platform designed to manage, search, and share the audiovisual content that matters most to your institution. Whether you are preserving historical recordings and intimate oral histories for deep academic research, or distributing critical public meetings and hearings to fulfill open government transparency regulations, Aviary makes your complex AV collections highly accessible, secure, and effortlessly discoverable.
§ 03 — Architecture
The Aviary Ecosystem
Every entity in Aviary connects through a deliberate schema — from organizations down to individual transcript annotations. Hover any node to see its role.
Fig. 01 — Aviary Entity Relationship Schema
§ 04 — Audience
Who Aviary serves
01
Public Users
Searching content in Aviary is free. Any public content is fully searchable — organizations, collections, resources, transcripts, indexes — and explorable through visualization tools.
Search now
02
Registered Users
Everything public users get, plus the ability to request access to private content directly from administrators. Coming soon: annotate at every level.
03
Organizations
Enhanced discoverability for your audiovisual collections. Bring content in via YouTube, Vimeo, Avalon, SoundCloud, or bulk import. Plans to fit any scale.
See plans§ 05 — Origin
How Aviary began
For nearly a decade, the information management experts at AVP watched archives and libraries struggle to host and share their audiovisual collections. Standard streaming platforms were built for entertainment, not archives. The turning point came in 2018 when AVP partnered with the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Fortunoff faced a unique challenge: they needed to offer advanced, in-depth searching within thousands of hours of sensitive video, while simultaneously maintaining nuanced, granular control over user access permissions. Existing platforms simply couldn't do both.
So, AVP and Fortunoff built one that could. Launched in 2019, the Aviary platform was designed to provide the ultimate balance: unlocking the deep searchability of time-based media using synchronized transcripts and indexes, while granting organizations absolute, granular control over who gets to see and hear their content. Today, Aviary brings that same tailor-made power to institutions worldwide, ensuring your most vital media is both perfectly protected and profoundly discoverable.