Creating and Accessing GitHub Accounts and Organizations

There are three types of accounts in GitHub: Personal, Enterprise, and Organizations.

Personal account

A personal GitHub account is for individuals working on their own AVAnnotate project. It’s where you host projects you’re developing alone or where you are the primary maintainer. Repositories created under your personal account are linked to your username (e.g., github.com/”yourname”/AVAnnotateproject). This setup is ideal for individual projects or those that do not require shared ownership or administrative roles.

Some scenarios that may best suit a personal account include:

  • Private audio file(s) and annotations available only to the owner.
  • Personal archive of video files that don’t require collaboration.
  • A dissertation project with audiovisual files and transcripts.

Organization account

An organization account is intended for collaboration. It is a shared account with sophisticated security and administrative features. It enables multiple users to contribute to and manage AVAnnotate projects under a shared group identity. Organizations are ideal for team-based class assignments, student groups, library staff, or departments that need to control access and assign roles (e.g., admin, maintainer, contributor). Projects created within an organization belong to the organization, not an individual.

Some scenarios that may best suit an organization account include:

  • Library-wide project using AVAnnotate to tag and transcribe oral histories.
  • Collaborative annotation of ethnographic interviews for a class project.
  • Departmental initiative to build a shared AVAnnotate project for research use.

Enterprise account

An enterprise account is for large-scale, often institution-level use. Currently, enterprise accounts do not work in AVAnnotate.

There are three steps to using new accounts and organizations in an AVAnnotate project:

  1. Create a new GitHub personal account or GitHub organization account.
  2. Give AVAnnotate permission to access the organization.
  3. AVAnnotate users will need to re-login to AVAnnotate to see the new account in the AVAnnotate Dashboard.