Merritt Digital Preservation Repository – August 2023

August 28, 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 August 2023

New Content and Collections

UC Riverside

The UC Riverside Library has recently requested the Merritt team establish a series of Nuxeo(DAMS)-to-Merritt direct deposits. These deposits include many Library Special Collections and University Archives holdings, as well several from the Water Resources Collections & Archives. Once established, direct deposits enable the metadata generated as a result of curation to be automatically captured as part of a Nuxeo feed that is then harvested and incorporated into resulting digital objects in Merritt. We’re excited to be working with the UC Riverside Library to help shepherd these new collections into the repository.

UC Berkeley

Over the course of August, UC Berkeley Library completed the deposit of numerous objects into a series of Library collections in Merritt, including:

UC Berkeley Library Examiner collection
UC Berkeley Library JVAC
UCB Library California Audio-Visual Preservation Project
UC Berkeley Library Bonney collection
UC Berkeley Library UC Pre 1912 Chinese Materials
UC Berkeley Library Bancroft Land claims in California
UC Berkeley Library 18th-century Italian Music Manuscripts

Digital Preservation Community

NDSA is just now starting work on the next iteration of its Storage survey. The Storage Survey Working Group will begin meeting in September. Last completed in 2019 by the NDSA community, the survey’s findings were published in February, 2020. The Storage Survey’s goal is to “to develop a snapshot of storage practices within the organizations of the NDSA and insight into how those practices change over time.” More information about the group’s next steps will become available as it begins its work.

And as a reminder, 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

As mentioned in our last update, the Merritt team has spun up a new project to enable all of the system’s microservices to use OpenSearch for logging events and issues. We’re pleased to say that we’ve established the regular import of operational logs from various components of our infrastructure as well as the infrastructure dedicated to the larger UC3 team at CDL. Initial mechanisms that output OpenSearch-compatible logs are now part of each Merritt microservice, and more robust logging is being enabled in our Storage service.

The team has also now generated JSON from Merritt’s inventory and billing databases for import into OpenSearch that enables us to track a variety of information about collection ownership, file size, file MIME type and chronological deposit data. These data are being visualized as part of OpenSearch data visualization and dashboard functionality. Data will be imported and refreshed on a daily basis for review. We look forward to sharing visualizations with campus libraries going forward.

Repository Metrics for August

Holdings Snapshot

Holdings as of July 1, 2023, fiscal year start:	479.45 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of August 28, 2023	532.08 TB for one copy
Holdings as of July 28, 2023	495.36 TB
Holdings as of June 30, 2023	479.45 TB
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

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

eScholarship	220,264
Dryad	48,008
University and Jepson Herbaria Image Archive	9,580
UC Berkeley Library JVAC	13,686
UC Berkeley Library Examiner collection	7,872
UCB Library California Audio-Visual Preservation Project (CAVPP)	808
UC Berkeley Library Bonney collection	6,386
UC Berkeley Library UC Pre 1912 Chinese Materials	3,514
UC Berkeley Library Bancroft Land claims in California	238,789
UC Berkeley Library 18th-century Italian Music Manuscripts	7,798
UC Irvine Library ETD	570
UCLA Library ETD	84
UC Merced Library ETD	71
UCSC Library Special Collections	850
UCSF Library Stanton A. Glantz collection	23