Merritt Digital Preservation Repository – July 2024

July 30, 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 July 2024

Content and Collections

Collaboration with the UC Santa Barbara Department of Education: Publishing and preserving dissertations whose research spans over four decades

CDL’s Merritt and PAD teams have been collaborating with distinguished Professor Emeritus Judith Green of the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education and Angela Chikowero, Open Access Collections Strategist at the UCSB Library, to both publish and preserve a series of dissertations which focus on ethnographic studies in education. These dissertations, dating from 1977 through 2018 span over four decades of research and are to be referenced in an upcoming book on Interactional Ethnography. Through our collaboration we look forward to publishing approximately 27 dissertation in eScholarship along with preserving their corresponding content files in Merritt.

New UCSC AV Collections Established

As mentioned in earlier posts, UC Santa Cruz Library Special Collections & Archives has undertaken a major AV preservation project. The Library recently asked us to establish six additional collections in Merritt for this effort.

Crown College Records UA103
Merrill College Records UA104
Kresge College Records UA106
Oakes College Records UA107
Research Center for the Americas Records UA120
Center for Cultural Studies UA121

SC&A is now working to stage new materials from their digitization vendor for the project in S3. To that end, the introduction of S3 presigned URLs in submission manifests will enable Merritt to directly download new content for ingest from the S3 bucket in use.

Active Collections

During the month of July, collections that were actively being deposited to include:

The University and Jepson Herbaria Image Archive
UC Berkeley School of Law, Robbins Collection
UC Berkeley Library Bancroft Selections

Digital Preservation Community

iPRES Program

The iPRES conference preliminary program is available, along with additional listings of each presentation or offering type. Offerings are listed by type at the bottom of the main program page.

What We’re Working On

Depositor Tools Survey

Over the past year the Merritt team has discussed a variety of ideas to enhance the experience of depositors, such as use of presigned URLs for uploading large submissions, a revised batch manifest type which supports file listings and multi-object metadata, along with potential user interface changes. In the near future, we will be reaching out to request input from depositors on what would improve their interactions with Merritt during the submission process. Stay tuned for more on this effort!

Object Analysis Documentation

Documentation for Merritt’s Object Analysis prototype is available for review. Its 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 during the second full week of August.

Object Update Tools

Recently our team has worked on devising strategies to update digital objects for a number of use cases including the removal of 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 Merritt’s Object Analysis prototype.

Repository Metrics for July

Holdings Snapshot

Holdings as of July 1, 2024, fiscal year start:	468.8 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of July 30, 2024	470.19 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of June 28, 2024	468.8 TB
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

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

eScholarship	185,159
University and Jepson Herbaria Image Archive	4,144
UC Berkeley School of Law, Robbins Collection	8,934
UCR Library ETDs	320
UC Santa Cruz Library ETDs	247
UC San Diego Library ETDs	363