Merritt Digital Preservation Repository – July 2022

July 28, 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 July 2022

New Content and Collections

During July over a dozen new collections were established in Merritt for incoming content from UC Merced, UC Irvine and UC Berkeley. Many of these new collections will be the destination for content that is first curated in Nuxeo. An automated harvest process established by the Merritt team will deposit Nuxeo objects and metadata into corresponding Merritt collections. Updates made in Nuxeo are harvested into Merritt every week as they become available.

Digital Preservation Community

A new report has been made available by Ithaka S+R entitled The Effectiveness and Durability of Preservation and Curation Systems. It is the result of an 18 month research project funded by IMLS. While the premise of the report is the existence of two distinct approaches to digital preservation – programatic preservation across institutions to preserve specific content types and collections, and use of third-party platforms by individual institutions or heritage organizations – research for the report focuses on the latter, third-party platform utilization. Examinations include, “not only the sustainability of the (third-party) providers but also the decision-making processes of heritage organizations and the challenges they face in working with the providers” given limited resources.

New for Merritt

Merritt has now replicated all Dryad research datasets to a new location on the US East coast using AWS Glacier. This replication will allow us to uphold our 3-2-1 preservation strategy (3 object copies, in two geographic locations with differing disaster threats, with one copy in near-line storage) while also keeping the storage cost for the preservation of Dryad content at a minimum.

What We’re Working On

The Merritt team is happy to note that its efforts on modernizing the system’s microservice builds will be completed during the first week of August 2022. As mentioned in last month’s post, these allow us to more readily update any part of the repository’s codebase, not only for the purpose of adding new functionality, but also for introducing high-priority software library dependency updates.

The team continues to work on extending its microservice integration tests as well, while also streamlining several aspects of the Nuxeo-to-Merritt harvest process mentioned above.

Repository Metrics

Holdings Snapshot

Holdings as of July 2021, fiscal year start:	192.04 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of June 28, 2022:	328.24 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of July 28, 2022:	346.67 TB (one copy)*

* As of July 2022, the Merritt system now actively manages more than 1 petabyte (PB) of content when the storage used by all three, distributed object copies is accounted for – a significant milestone in the repository’s history.

Active collections in July (new files added):

eScholarship	208,315
Dryad	26,542
UC Berkeley Library Stone Rubbings Collection	41,844
UC Berkeley Library UC Pre 1912 Chinese Materials	42,098
UC Berkeley Library PROFIT	830
UC Berkeley Library Greek Papyri	385
UC Berkeley Library Panama-Pacific International Exposition	5,652
UC Berkeley Library Japanese Manuscripts	558
UC Irvine SCA University Archives	2,362
UC Irvine Library SCA University Publications	272
UC Merced Library McLean Collection	160
UC Merced Library UCCE Humboldt County	4,644
UCR Library ETDs	306
UC Riverside Library Nuxeo collection	3,748
UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations	157