Merritt Digital Preservation Repository – June & July 2023

June 30, 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 June and July 2023

New Content and Collections

UC Merced UCCE ANR

Last year UC Merced Library began archiving video files in Merritt associated with their Cooperative Extension, Agriculture and Natural Resources (ANR) program. Many of these materials are related to the Library’s recent photography exhibit, “A Century of Impact in California’s Counties: Highlights from the University of California Cooperative Archive” and archival documents from the California Agricultural Resources Archive (CARA). In June, we assisted the Library with ingesting many more high resolution, digitized videos as well as their corresponding single frame DPX files (see Metrics below for the UC Merced Library UCCE ANR collection below).

The UC Berkeley Law Robbins Collection

We’ve begun to work with the Robbins Collection special collections library at the UC Berkeley Law school. The Library has embarked on a project to digitize over 275 manuscripts, the majority of which are medieval. Our goal will be to archive these in Merritt over the next several months as the project progresses. Look for updates on this effort in future monthly posts here.

Update: The COVID Tracking Project Archive at UCSF

As mentioned in an earlier post, we’ve been collaborating with UCSF Archives & Special Collections to manage the ingest of the COVID Tracking Project (CTP) Archive into Merritt. We’re excited to say that we’ve completed depositing all content into this collection in Merritt. In the coming weeks, we will complete this project by pushing copies of the screenshots from this archive to GitHub for public sharing purposes.

Update: UC Berkeley’s UC and Jepson Herbaria

As you may recall from our last update, the initial automated deposits of legacy specimen image content had just been ingested into Merritt at the end of March. During June and July, these deposits have been in full swing, being driven by Berkeley’s Research, Teaching & Learning (RTL) pipeline and a concerted effort by UC Jeps to load multiple AWS Snowcones with legacy content for input into the pipeline. Over 600K images are now being preserved in Merritt.

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

In the months of June and July we wrapped up all ingests for the Palestinian Museum’s archive in Merritt. This amounts to over 146,000 objects, many with multiple images. We’ve also completed validating the contents of the associated Merritt collection with our known inventory of all archive content from the Museum. In the future we’ll work with UCLA to coordinate ingests of the latest MODS metadata files for objects in the collection.

Digital Preservation Community

Registration is now open for major digital preservation conferences that are set to occur in the fall. These include iPRES, which will take place in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, as well as NDSA’s DigiPres, in St. Louis Missouri. In advance of DigiPres, CLIR is hosting its annual DLF forum and Learn@DLF events.

What We’re Working On

The Merritt team has spun up a new project to enable all of the system’s microservices to use OpenSearch for logging system events and issues. We’re just now deploying the initial implementation in each microservice to populate log data in OpenSearch and will be incrementally replacing all logging functionality to enable granular log data to be collected in OpenSearch. Ultimately this project will enable us to track operational metrics about Merritt that we cannot currently track. Among many other aspects, these will allow for insights into critical system events such as monitoring for the duration of all ingest operations associated with submissions (on a per submission basis), as well as gathering data on the usage of Merritt’s UI and accompanying key events.

Repository Metrics for June and July

Holdings Snapshot

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

Holdings as of July 28, 2023	495.36 TB for one copy
Holdings as of June 30, 2023	479.45 TB for one copy – 150 TB added for FY 22-23
Holdings as of April 28, 2023	431.34 TB
Holdings as of March 24, 2023	425.50 TB
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 JUNE (new files added – a single digital object can contain one or more files):

eScholarship	336,800
Dryad	39,985
Palestinian Museum Collection	115,144
University and Jepson Herbaria Image Archive	260,855
UC Davis ETD	407
UCI Library ETD	158
UCLA Library ETD	942
UC Merced Library UCCE ANR	1,528,746
UCSD Library ETD	302
UCSF ETD	159

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

eScholarship	251,680
Dryad	33,501
Palestinian Museum Collection	2,023
University and Jepson Herbaria Image Archive	318,879
UC Davis ETD	407
UCI Library ETD	158
UCLA Library ETD	50
UCR Library ETD	268
UCSD Library ETD	853
UCSF ETD	159
UCSF: The COVID Tracking Project Records	322,481