Merritt Digital Preservation Repository – January 2023

January 27, 2023 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 January 2023

New Content and Collections

UC Berkeley Jepson Herbarium

We continue to work with our colleagues at the UC Berkeley Jepson Herbarium and Berkeley’s Research, Teaching & Learning program (RTL). RTL has made significant progress on development of the automation that will enable the processing of legacy content and its submission to Merritt. We expect to order our initial AWS Snowcone device in February, at which point we’ll work together on-site to set up the device and subsequently load 8TB of images onto it. Once returned to AWS, these images will be deposited into an S3 bucket for collection, processing and submission. Our goal is to load one Snowcone per month and work our way through all legacy specimen images.

Palestinian Museum and UCLA’s International Digital Ephemera Project (IDEP)

As mentioned in our November post, we programmatically collected preservation metadata for over 140,000 images in the Palestinian Museum’s archive. At the end of December we began ingesting series of objects into Merritt. At this time there are over 15,500 objects in the Museum’s collection in Merritt, many with multiple images. We will continue to ingest archive content until over a 110 thousand objects are being preserved. In parallel, UCLA has been working with new metadata from the Museum in order to generate MODS files for each object.

New UC Berkeley collections established in January

UC Berkeley Library Bancroft Out West
UC Berkeley Library Bancroft Overland Monthly
UC Berkeley Library Bancroft Golden Era
UC Berkeley Library Bancroft Pacific School Journal
UC Berkeley Library Bancroft Pandex of the Press
UC Berkeley Library Bancroft Northern Crown
UC Berkeley Library Bancroft Coronado Tent City News

Digital Preservation Community

The Digital Preservation Coalition has once again begun their weekly DPConnect sessions. The DPC hosts these sessions to provide an open forum to discuss all things digital preservation.

NDSA’s Interest groups are spinning back up for the year as well. On February 1^st, the Content interest group will hold its initial meeting of 2023. This will be followed by an Infrastructure interest group meeting on March 20^th.

What We’re Working On

We’re excited to say that the Merritt team has completed its implementation of resources that will allow Dryad to transition away from using the SWORD protocol for submissions, as well as an OAI PMH feed for confirmation of content deposits. The Dryad team has already begun taking advantage of these resources for content deposit confirmation. In the near future our plan is to deprecate SWORD in favor of a process that involves custom prioritization of Dryad submissions.

Repository Metrics for January

Holdings Snapshot

Holdings as of July 1, 2022, fiscal year start:	328.61 T TB (one copy)

Holdings as of January 27, 2023	411.54 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of November 30, 2022	395.85 TB
Holdings as of October 31, 2022	390.99 TB
Holdings as of September 26, 2022	378.30 TB
Holdings as of August 30, 2022:	374.21 TB
Holdings as of July 28, 2022:	346.67 TB

Active collections in January (new files added – a single digital object can contain one or more files):

eScholarship	60,377
Dryad	34,677
Palestinian Museum Collection	17,015
UC Berkeley Library Oral Histories	675
UC Berkeley Library Pre-1912 Chinese Materials	38,680
UCI Library ETD	224
UC Merced Library Ernest Lowe Photography Collection	8,301
UC Merced Library UCCE Madera County	303
UC Merced Library UCCE Modoc County	33,585
UCSC Library Special Collections	528
UCSD Library ETD	395