Merritt Digital Preservation Repository – June 2024

June 28, 2024 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 2024

Content and Collections

Active Collections

In the month of June, collections that were actively being deposited to include:

The University and Jepson Herbaria Image Archive
UC Berkeley Library California Audio-Visual Preservation Project (CAVPP)
UCLA Library ETDs
UC Santa Cruz Library Special Collections

Digital Preservation Community

OPF releases update for JHOVE

The Open Preservation Foundation has made available a new release of JHOVE – version 1.30. This was announced in their Summer 2024 Newsletter in early June. Release notes are available on the associated update page.

What We’re Working On

Ingest Queue Design

We’re excited to note that Merritt’s redesigned Ingest and Inventory implementation has reached our Stage environment! The new design is being implemented as part of a longstanding effort introduce more transparency into the repository’s ingest operations which in turn will provide much more granular feedback to depositors in terms of submission status. Further information is available on upcoming queue states and state transition details.

Object Analysis Documentation

Documentation for Merritt’s Object Analysis prototype is now available for review. It’s goal is to enable depositors to learn more about analyses made possible by the prototype, as well as to document suggested analysis requests that surface specific characteristics about objects in collections. We’ll be walking through this documentation at the upcoming UC Libraries Born Digital CKG meeting at the beginning of August.

Object Update Tools

Both ahead of (and to follow) the queue design, our team has worked on devising strategies to update digital objects. Our use cases include helping depositors address removing unwanted files, file naming convention changes, changes in object composition due to updated curation practices and storage savings among others. We look forward to sharing more information about these update strategies, many of which are designed to complement the Merritt’s Object Analysis prototype.

Repository Metrics for June

Holdings Snapshot

Holdings as of July 1, 2023, fiscal year start:	479.45 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of June 28, 2024	468.8 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of May 31, 2024	459.06 TB
Holdings as of April 29, 2024	454.66 TB
Deaccessioned Holdings (Dryad)	154.7 TB
Holdings as of March 28, 2024	607.96 TB
Holdings as of November 30, 2023	576.43 TB
Holdings as of October 30, 2023	571.69 TB
Holdings as of September 28, 2023	558.66 TB
Holdings as of August 28, 2023	532.08 TB
Holdings as of July 28, 2023	495.36 TB

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

eScholarship	130,026
University and Jepson Herbaria Image Archive	2,003
UCB Library California Audio-Visual Preservation Project	2,091
UCLA Library ETDs	1,140
UC San Diego Library ETDs	274