Merritt Digital Preservation Repository – June 2022

June 30, 2022 Author: Eric LopatinCategories:

Merritt is a digital preservation repository from the University of California Curation Center (UC3) that enables the UC community to manage, archive, and share its valuable digital content.

Welcome to the Merritt service update for June 2022!

New Content and Collections

During June UC Berkeley continued to add content to its recently established Pre 1912 Chinese Materials collection. These incoming objects are unique in the sense that each is established via an individual ingest manifest and may contain hundreds or thousands of digitized pages, resulting in objects that occupy up to 2TB of storage a piece.

Meanwhile, on the front of DAMS integration, we’ve received many new requests for Nuxeo-to-Merritt direct deposits from both UC Irvine and UC Merced. Having begun in June, we’ll continue to work on establishing associated automation that pulls new Nuxeo collection content into Merritt. We look forward to helping our colleagues at Irvine build upon their existing University Archives and Publications collections in Merritt, while also working with our colleagues at Merced to shepherd in new content related to their work with UC Cooperative Extension programs.

Digital Preservation Community

The NDSA Infrastructure Interest Group met for its quarterly meeting on June 27. Our guest speaker for the meeting was Leslie Johnston, NARA’s Director of Digital Preservation. Leslie walked the group through NARA’s adoption of AWS GovCloud, while providing context pertaining to changes in their repository architecture and preservation policies and practices. This talk will be posted on the Infrastructure Interest Group’s YouTube channel soon, along with all of our past meeting recordings.

New for Merritt

Though Merritt’s Collection Administration application does not currently present user-facing features, our recent work on this tool has enabled internal team members to manage incoming content at both a collection and object level. While we look forward to a time that the repository is able to automatically scale its services to accommodate both high and low amounts of ingest traffic, these new administrative features have proven essential for us lately as we now have the tooling to control heavy traffic and associated submissions if necessary.

What We’re Working On

The Merritt team is wrapping up its work on modernizing the system’s microservice builds. Though not actual feature development, this refactoring plays an important role – it allows us to more readily update any part of the repository’s codebase, not only for the purpose of adding new functionality, but also for introducing high-priority software library dependency updates. At a similar level, we’ve also been working to significantly increase the number of integration tests that are driven by the same build process. Every test added lends increased flexibility to our development efforts through more assurance that bugs will be caught earlier during feature implementation.

Repository Metrics

Holdings Snapshot

Holdings as of July 2021, fiscal year start:	192.04TB (one copy)
Holdings as of June 28, 2022:	328.24TB (one copy)

Active collections in June (new files added):

eScholarship	57,069
Dryad	32,933
UC Berkeley Library UC Pre 1912 Chinese Materials	61,269
UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations	503
UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations	624
UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations	165