Merritt Digital Preservation Repository – October 2022

October 31, 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 October 2022

New Content and Collections

During the month of October, we established nine new collections for UC Berkeley:

UC Berkeley Library EAL Jiyi Remembrance
UC Berkeley Library Humanities ASLA annual meeting proceedings
UC Berkeley Library Al-masar
UC Berkeley Library Humanities Funambulist
UC Berkeley Library Humanities L’Italo-Americano
UC Berkeley Library Humanities Mozartfest
UC Berkeley Library PlanEcon Report
UC Berkeley Library Sciences Renewable Resources Journal
UC Berkeley Library Humanities UCLA Anderson Forecast for the Nation and California

We’ve also been collaborating with colleagues at the UC Berkeley Jepson Herbarium and Berkeley’s Research, Teaching & Learning program to devise new workflows for the herbarium to ingest both legacy and newly scanned specimen images into Merritt. These will leverage AWS Snowcone devices and customization to existing media uploading software, the latter of which integrated with Collection Space. Stay tuned to learn more about this effort as our project progresses.

Digital Preservation Community

The NDSA DigiPres “Preserving Legacy” conference took place in Baltimore, Maryland on October 12th and 13th. Hosted by CLIR and DLF, the conference program included a wide variety of topics covering digital preservation policy, technologies, advocacy and sustainability. As an attendee and service manager for Merritt, it was a wonderful opportunity to catch up (in person) with colleagues from not only the NDSA, but from other UC campuses as well. DigiPres tends to be a smaller and more intimate conference where one can readily engage with speakers and learn more about the experiences and projects other organizations have tackled in the digital preservation space. I was intrigued by studies completed on environmental impact, by the NDSA’s presentation of its staffing survey data, discussions surrounding the Digital Preservation Services Collaborative’s Declaration of Shared Values and happy to have had a chance to speak directly to a number of NDSA members who have participated in our ongoing Infrastructure Interest Group.

What We’re Working On

As mentioned in our last update, Merritt’s Ingest and Storage microservices are now using Amazon FSx for OpenZFS as an intermediate storage space during the ingestion process rather than AWS EFS. Over the past month, the team has been very pleased with the behavior of this new service in terms of its network bandwidth and speed. On one particularly busy day, Merritt processed 3.5TB of incoming content. While this is in alignment with our previous observations when Ingest and Storage used EFS, the difference in behavior we observed was much less CPU I/O wait on hosts. In other words, the hosts involved in processing content were being used much more efficiently than in the past, prior to the introduction of ZFS.

Repository Metrics for October

Holdings Snapshot

Holdings as of July 1, 2022, fiscal year start:	328.61 T TB (one copy)

Holdings as of October 31, 2022	390.99 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of September 26, 2022	378.30 TB
Holdings as of August 30, 2022:	374.21 TB
Holdings as of July 28, 2022:	346.67 TB

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

eScholarship	71,871
Dryad	29,503
UCB Library ETDs	332
UC Berkeley Library EAL Julean Arnold Snapshots	1,766
UC Berkeley Library EAL Ground and Aerial Views of China	533
UCI Library ETD	410
UC Irvine SCA University Archives	46
UCLA ETDs	33
UC Merced Library Ernest Lowe Photography Collection	8,301
UC Merced Library UCCE Mariposa County	24,126
UCR Library ETDs	221
UC Riverside Library Nuxeo collection	846
UC Santa Barbara ETD	257
UCSC Library ETD	158
UCSD Library ETDs	51