Merritt Digital Preservation Repository – August 2022

August 30, 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 August 2022

New Content and Collections

The month of August saw completion of a range of deposits through our Nuxeo-to-Merritt direct deposit system. The majority of direct deposit submissions involved the ingest of archival content for UC Merced’s UC Cooperative Extension (UCCE) programs. UC Berkeley requested the creation of several new collections as well, including their new UC Berkeley Library California Sheet Music collection. This now houses high-resolution images from the The California Sheet Music Project which showcases sheet music published in California between 1852 and 1900 compiled under the direction of Mary Kay Duggan (professor emeritus, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley). You can browse over 2600 items in this collection via Calisphere.

Digital Preservation Community

Just around the corner is what many consider to be the premier annual conference of the larger digital preservation community – iPres. Held in Glasgow, Scotland this year, with both in-person and online sessions, iPres draws a wide array of attendees and presenters from throughout the community. This year’s conference incorporates the themes of environment, community, exchange, innovation and resilience. It also brings back a trademark event at the conference, the annual Digital Preservation Bake Off Challenge (no baking involved).

New(s) for Merritt

We’re very happy to announce that Merritt won a Mojgan Amini Operational Excellence Award at this year’s UC Tech conference held at UC San Diego! UC Tech Awards “recognize individuals and teams in the UC technology community for their contributions to advancing the university’s mission.” Read more about our submission to the awards committee here.

What We’re Working On

This month the Merritt team and UC3’s dev/ops engineer spent time testing a new intermediate storage file system offered by AWS. Known as Amazon FSx for OpenZFS, it leverages the OpenZFS file system and introduces significantly higher throughput for both reading and writing data as compared to the Amazon EFS volume Merritt’s Ingest and Storage microservices currently share as a staging area prior to writing incoming content to cloud storage. We also investigated the use of different EC2 instance types for our Audit microservice in an effort to reduce the cycle of time it takes to fixity check Merritt’s entire corpus.

Repository Metrics for August

Holdings Snapshot

Holdings as of July 2021, fiscal year start:	192.04 TB (one copy)

Holdings as of August 30, 2022:	374.21 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of July 28, 2022:	346.67 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of June 28, 2022:	328.24 TB (one copy)

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

eScholarship	125,434
Dryad	35,026
UC Berkeley Library Census of Housing (1970)	4,303
UC Berkeley Library California Sheet Music	15,732
UC Berkeley Library Hiram Johnson Papers	7,023
UC Davis ETDs	401
UC Irvine SCA University Archives	92
UCLA ETDs	93
UC Merced Library UCCE ANR	11,327
UC Merced Library UCCE Fresno County	7,072
UC Merced Library UCCE San Joaquin County	121,025
UC Santa Barbara ETDs	256