Aviary Features

Bulk Edit Resources

In the Resource management page you can perform a series of bulk actions. To do so, select the Resources you wish to edit by clicking on the checkbox on the left. You can also use the Search box to narrow the number of Resources displayed and then select the resources.
Next, click on the "Table Options" dropdown and select "Bulk Edit Options".
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The Bulk Edit options are:
Change Status: you can change Resources status' to/from public, restricted, private.
Change Featured: select "yes" or "no".
Assign to Collection: changes the Collection the Resource(s) belongs to. Resources can only belong to one collection at a time.
Assign to Playlist: add the selected Resource(s) to an existing Playlist. Resources can belong to multiple Playlists and they can be listed in a Playlist more than once.
Change Media File Status: change to/from private or public. This will update all Media Files that belong to the selected Resources.
Change Index Status: change to/from private or public. This will update all Indexes that belong to the selected Resources.
Change Transcript Status: change to/from private or public. This will update all Transcripts that belong to the selected Resources.
Bulk Delete: deletes all selected Resources as well as their associated Media, Indexes, and Transcripts.

Bulk Metadata Edit
By selecting the "Import Bulk Metadata Edit CSV" option, you can bulk edit metadata for one or more resources.
If you first choose "Export Resources to CSV" (note: you can export all resources to CSV or you can select just the ones you want to edit), then you will get a CSV with resource IDs (and existing metadata) for each resource. This export option is based on the columns you have selected to be present in the Resource table at the time of export. To manage columns, select "Table Options" → "Manage Table" (see image at top of page above) and select the columns you would like to be present in the table.
If you supply an export.csv file with valid resource identifiers in the first column (column header = aviary ID), then Aviary will update the metadata for the resource identifiers that are present in the CSV.
For fields that are repeatable, we support using double colons "::" or double semi-colons ";;" as the label/value separator, and we use the pipe character "|" as the values separator.
If new data is present in a column, then existing data will be updated for that field (column header must match the name of an existing metadata field in Aviary).
If a new column is present, then a new metadata field will be created (i.e., if a column header does not match the name of an existing metadata field in Aviary, a new field will be created).
If no column is present in the csv that matches the names of existing fields, then those existing fields will not be deleted or edited.
If a field is null for a row in a column whose header matches the name of an existing metadata field in Aviary, then metadata will not be affected for that row if it is already present for the matching resource in Aviary.
If a field contains [TRUNCATE], then metadata for that field will be deleted for the resource if it is present in the system.
Some columns that are present in the export.csv will not be editable and will be ignored: Aviary Resource ID, PURL,URL Embed, Media Embed ,Collection, Resource File Count, Transcripts Count, Indexes Count, Public, Updated At, Duration.

Notes about CSV formatting and common errors with importing:
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We see common errors when CSVs have an extra three hidden bytes at the beginning of the file (see screenshot below showing a hex editor view).
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A couple of points about the issue:
1. When you save a file in excel as "UTF-8" CSV, excel adds these three byte marks to the start of the file. It's normal. Aviary should handle these bytes better during import, but we're not actually handling them properly at this point and they get added into the first column label and then Aviary doesn't recognize that label and so the import fails. We are going to be adding improved support for ignoring these bytes when they are present in the future but it may be a few weeks before we get it into the pipeline and into production.
2. Unless you have to, don't save the file as UTF-8 CSV, just save as regular CSV files for the time being. If you have to save as UTF-8, then you can easily open the CSV in a hex editor and delete the first three bytes (as seen in the screenshot) and save the file and then Aviary will not have issues with it.
Let us know () if you have issues with CSV metadata imports.

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