Merritt Digital Preservation Repository – May 2022

May 27, 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 May 2022!

New Content and Collections

During May a variety of new content was added to Merritt, ranging from high-resolution videos associated with the tobacco research of Stanton A. Glantz (UCSF) to over 12,000 images for UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library Selections collection, to hundreds of objects for Berkeley’s newly-established Japanese American Records collection for materials dated from 1930-1974.

Over the course of the month we’ve also facilitated discussions surrounding several new projects. For example, as part of a larger initiative to enable preserving specimen images from participating organizations in the Consortium of California Herbaria, we’ve collaborated with individuals at the UC Davis Herbarium to work through the logistics of how the herbarium’s extensive, existing collection of images will be pulled from BOX to ingest into Merritt. We have also had initial discussions with Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology with regard to preserving the contents of their Archives in Merritt, and with Berkeley’s KALX radio station on their push to archive recordings and program guides on the station’s 60th anniversary.

Digital Preservation Community

Close to home, the UC’s Digital Preservation Leadership Group has submitted a funding request to DOC for a new system-wide digital preservation strategy and training program. Its Training subgroup recently attended a DOC meeting where the request was approved for movement forward to and review by CoUL. This review will likely take place during CoUL’s extended meeting in late June.

New for Merritt

Manifest files provide the primary means with which to ingest large batches of new content into Merritt. The Merritt team has recently introduced a new online tool to assist with the creation of manifest files. We’ve also revamped our documentation associated with manifests so it not only provides added context but also step-by-step instructions for using the new tool. Have a look and feel free to reach out to us with questions and suggestions!

What We’re Working On

Behind the scenes, the Merritt Team is working on improving the system’s ability to queue the ingest of new and updated content that resides in Nuxeo. We’ve seen an increased number of new direct deposit requests that are addressed by setting up automated jobs which harvest content from Nuxeo on a weekly basis. Though this project has been on our radar for some time now, the team has begun to dig into how we’ll make our overall queueing system more nimble and able to balance daily ingest operations with these weekly harvests.

Repository Metrics

Holdings Snapshot

Holdings as of July 2021, fiscal year start:	192.04TB
Holdings as of May 31, 2022:	308.14TB

Active collections in May (new files added):

eScholarship	104,037
Dryad	40,031
UC Berkeley Library Bancroft Selections	12,534
UC Berkeley Library Bancroft General collection	23,643
UCB Library Indochina Archives Collection	407
UC Berkeley Library Kroeber Papers	108,737
UC Berkeley Library Japanese American Records 1930-1974	215,765
UC Davis ETDs	355
UCLA Library ETDs	284
UC Merced Library UCCE Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties	35,640
UCSF ETDs and Vintage Theses and Disserations	1,276
UCSF Library Stanton A. Glantz Collection	700