Merritt Digital Preservation Repository – August 2025

August 28, 2025 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 August 2025

Content and Collections

Active Collections in August

The following collections were actively being expanded upon during the month of June:

UC Irvine Vietnamese American Oral History Project
UC Irvine Library Jacques Derrida Papers
University and Jepson Herbaria Image Archive
UC Berkeley School of Law, Robbins Collection
ETDs collections from nearly all campuses

Digital Preservation Community

APTrust & CDL Cloud Workshop at iPRES 2025

iPRES 2025 will take place in Wellington, New Zealand this year. The conference program is available and includes a 3-hour workshop on digital preservation in the cloud, presented by representatives of APTrust and the Merritt team. This workshop builds on the panel of the same topic from the 2024 conference. It will focus on lessons, strategies and good practices by providing three breakout sessions pertaining to: Digital Preservation Actions, FinOps, and DevOps. Participants will be able to move through each breakout, which will be repeated three times, with a good practices document to be authored during the workshop proceedings. Please join us!

DPC Preservation Registries Special Interest Group

The Digital Preservation Coalition hosts a monthly meeting that “provides a space to discuss anything and everything related to the maintenance and use of format registries in digital preservation.” Their next meeting will be on Thursday, September 4th. DPC members and non-members alike are welcome. These meetings are hosted to enable the larger digital preservation community to ask questions on registries and gather feedback on the Registries of Good Practice project. More information is also available via the project’s GitHub repo. Have a look if you’re interested in engaging!

NDSA Infrastructure Interest Group

On September 15 at 10AM Pacific, NDSA’s Infrastructure Interest Group will discuss a reading selection by Dr. Rebecca Frank, Assistant Professor of Information at the University of Michigan. Titled Constructing risk in trustworthy digital repositories this research article investigates the “construction of risk within trustworthy digital repository audits. It contends that risk is a social construct, and social factors influence how stakeholders in digital preservation processes comprehend and react to risk.” An Open Access copy of the article is available. Although it will certainly touch on the aspects of repository certification related to technology, this discussion promises to go beyond infrastructure and into the realm of sociology. For information on how to join the meeting, please see the group’s running notes document for 2025 meetings. We hope to see you there!

What We’re Working On

The Merritt team is making major headway on its effort to containerize both Merritt’s administrative layer and the repository as a whole. This month our Merritt Admin tool moved to running in Amazon’s Elastic Container Service (ECS). The team now has multiple development environments available that are running the full Merritt stack using ECS and Fargate, each with a specific focus or utility. These can be spun up and shut down by way of AWS CodePipelines and leverage custom Sceptre code and CloudFormation. We are super excited by this progress as it leads us closer to the reality of establishing Stage and Production environments that will be able to scale according to varying rates of deposit by our users across campus libraries and memory organizations.

Repository Metrics for June

Holdings Snapshot

Holdings as of July 1, 2024, fiscal year start:	468.8 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of August 28, 2025	581.59 TB (one copy) NOTE: This reduced total reflects a change in metrics to adjust for object updates that have occurred since the beginning of FY 24-25. The object update process removed redundant files from digital objects across Nuxeo direct-deposit collections.
Holdings as of June 27, 2025	584.00 TB
Holdings as of May 30, 2025	577.73 TB
Holdings as of March 27, 2025	564.84 TB
Holdings as of February 27, 2025	536.42 TB
Holdings as of January 30, 2025	509.96 TB
Holdings as of October 30, 2024	492.02 TB
Holdings as of September 27, 2024	489.33 TB
Holdings as of August 29, 2024	471.27 TB
Holdings as of July 30, 2024	470.19 TB

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

eScholarship	137,715
University and Jepson Herbaria Image Archive	4,094
UC Berkeley School of Law, Robbins Collection	23,557
UC Irvine Vietnamese American Oral History Project	102
UCB Library ETDs	3,432
UC Davis ETDs	2,701
UCI Library ETD	397
UCLA Library ETDs	612
UCR Library ETDs	1,209
UC Santa Barbara ETD	1,118
UCSC Library ETD	1,152
UCSD Library ETD	243