Merritt Digital Preservation Repository – November 2022

November 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 November 2022

New Content and Collections

Palestinian Museum and UCLA’s International Digital Ephemera Project (IDEP)

During the month of November we collaborated with our colleagues at UCLA and the Palestinian Museum to move forward with programmatically collecting preservation metadata for over 140,000 images in the Museum’s archive. This process involved working with our internal IAS team to install a Collective Access MySQL database snapshot into a standalone AWS RDS instance in order to enable querying the database for image-specific metadata. Through extensive investigation we were able to extract a variety of metadata for each image that will be mapped to Merritt’s object-level metadata fields. Our immediate next step is to conduct a final review of this metadata with UCLA alongside of a new metadata export generated directly from Collective Access by the Museum for use with IDEP. Our goal is to begin object ingests in December.

UC Berkeley Jepson Herbarium

In last month’s post was mention of our work with colleagues at the UC Berkeley Jepson Herbarium and Berkeley’s Research, Teaching & Learning program. We’re excited to say that we are working toward the goal of ordering an initial AWS Snowcone device at the beginning of January 2023 to begin the process of ingesting thousands of the Herbarium’s specimen images into Merritt. More on this effort when we reach this next milestone!

Digital Preservation Community

The NDSA held an open call to gather input from its members on Ithaka S+R’s The Effectiveness and Durability of Digital Preservation and Curation Systems report that was published in July 2022. Over 70 members joined for a lively discussion. In the near future, look for a blog post from the NDSA purposed to communicate the community’s feedback gathered from this call.

What We’re Working On

The Merritt team is currently working closely with Dryad to update the workflow between both services. Since the initial integration took place – which predates Dryad, back to CDL’s DASH service – two technologies have been in play to enable ingest of datasets into Merritt. These include the SWORD protocol as well as an OAI PMH feed. Using building blocks the Merritt team is putting in place, we will be transitioning Dryad to an ingest pathway that no longer involves these, yet enables custom prioritization of Dryad submissions. The team looks forward to reporting back once all the pieces are in place and this transition has been completed.

Repository Metrics for November

Holdings Snapshot

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

Holdings as of November 30, 2022	395.85 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of October 31, 2022	390.99 TB
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 November (new files added – a single digital object can contain one or more files):

eScholarship	79,240
Dryad	32,992
UCB Transportation Studies	17
UC Davis ETDs	352
UCLA ETDs	55
UC Merced Library ETDs	93
UC Merced Library UCCE Madera County	3,572
UCR Library ETDs	221
UC Riverside Library Nuxeo collection	6,222