Merritt Digital Preservation Repository – March 2023

March 29, 2023 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 March 2023

New Content and Collections

Update: UC Berkeley Jepson Herbarium

In late February we successfully set up an AWS Snowcone device at Jepson. The first multi-terabyte batch of content was then copied to the device and shipped back to AWS for transfer to an S3 bucket. With much concerted effort on the parts of the herbarium and Berkeley’s Research, Teaching & Learning (RTL) development staff, the first automated Jepson Herbarium specimen image deposits were successfully ingested into Merritt on March 24th! We look forward to our continued collaboration as we work through the ingest of this initial content batch, followed by further Snowcone cycles for the remainder of legacy specimen images.

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

We’re pleased to say that we’ve ingested over 71,000 objects, many with multiple images into the Palestinian Museum archive’s Merritt collection. We will continue to ingest archive content until over 110 thousand objects are being preserved. In parallel, UCLA has been working with new metadata from the Museum in order to generate MODS files for each object. Several challenges arose with this coordination, including how to handle multilingual metadata for specific fields, as well as handling data merges for others. The highest priority application of this metadata will be to the corresponding IDEP website.

Digital Preservation Community

NDSA‘s Interest group meetings have spun back up for the year. The most recent of which, for the Infrastructure interest group, was on March 20th. Topics discussed included the role of AI now and in the future for digital preservation and appraisal, as well as variations on appropriate 3-2-1 approaches for a variety of content. This latter conversation also briefly touched on next generation storage technologies. See the group’s running notes document for links and additional information.

Separately, the Library of Congress held its annual Designing Storage Architectures meeting on March 27-28. Presentations on storage industry technology, storage challenges in the community and alternative media on the horizon were all included. Presentations should be made available within a few weeks at digitalpreservation.gov.

What We’re Working On

The Dryad team has now fully migrated away from use of the SWORD protocol for deposits into Merritt! All Dryad submissions are now made through our normal submission process and prioritized appropriately.

And on a separate note, the Merritt team is excited to announce it has now renewed its CoreTrustSeal certification for the repository! Please look for a forthcoming blog post on this effort at uc3.cdlib.org.

Repository Metrics for March

Holdings Snapshot

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

Holdings as of March 24, 2023	425.50 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of January 27, 2023	411.54 TB
Holdings as of November 30, 2022	395.85 TB
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 March (new files added – a single digital object can contain one or more files):

eScholarship	115,411
Dryad	36,643
Palestinian Museum Collection	20,353
UC Berkeley Library PlanEcon Report	236
UC Davis ETD	485
UCLA Library ETD	165
UC Merced Library UCCE Madera County	3,152
UCSC Library Special Collections	6,206