Merritt Digital Preservation Repository – September 2023

September 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 September 2023

New Content and Collections

UC Berkeley Library

Two new collections were established for UC Berkeley Library in September:

UC Berkeley Library Humanities & Social Sciences
UC Berkeley Library Sciences

Several terabytes of new deposits into the Library’s existing California Audio-Visual Preservation Project and 18th-century Italian Music Manuscripts were completed.

UC Berkeley School of Law, Robbins Collection

As mentioned in an earlier post, 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. We are currently in the process of staging the first batch of manuscripts, gathering metadata and assembling submission manifests to facilitate manuscript ingest into the repository.

UC Riverside

We’re pleased to say that over the past month we’ve established 18 new Nuxeo-to-Merritt direct deposits for UC Riverside Library. These deposits include many Library Special Collections and University Archives holdings, as well several from the Water Resources Collections & Archives. Over a dozen more are planned for the month of October.

Digital Preservation Community

On notes related to digital preservation workflows at UC –

The UC Libraries Born Digital Content Common Knowledge Group (CKG) recently held a broad discussion surrounding preservation repository deposit workflows, tools and specifications of several types (including DART, OCFL, and Bagger profiles). Their discussion will continue in October, with a focus on formulating a Beyond the Repository AIP profile.

In early November, members of the CDL PAD and Merritt teams plan to hold an open discussion on the Nuxeo-to-Merritt deposit workflow to promote cross-campus knowledge sharing.

What We’re Working On

The Merritt team continues work on its project to enable the repository to use OpenSearch for logging operational events and issues. Our Storage service is now able to generate data that allows us to visualize deposit and access (object downloads) service activity over time. We’re also able to isolate activity based on object primary identifiers (ARKs), and are working to establish robust event logging capabilities across all of Merritt’s microservices, with the Ingest service next on our list.

On the front of visualizing the composition of individual collections in terms of file types, objects and object metadata, we’ve begun work on a prototype that will allow depositors to introspect a collection’s contents vis-à-vis a series of considerations or factors to highlight where improvements could be made to existing content. Stay tuned for more updates regarding this aspect of the project.

Repository Metrics for September

Holdings Snapshot

Holdings as of July 1, 2023, fiscal year start:	479.45 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of September 28, 2023	558.66 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of August 28, 2023	532.08 TB
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 September (new files added – a single digital object can contain one or more files):

eScholarship	152,013
Dryad	48,169
University and Jepson Herbaria Image Archive	11,151
UCB Library California Audio-Visual Preservation Project (CAVPP)	11,087
UC Berkeley Library 18th-century Italian Music Manuscripts	3,490
UCB Library ETDs	862
UC Davis ETD	475
UCLA Library ETDs	437
UC Merced Library UCCE San Diego County	3,262
UCR Water Resources Collections and Archive: LA Aqueduct	2,285
UC Riverside Library Nuxeo collection	41,556
UCSC Library ETD	121
UCSD Library ETD	235
UCSF ETD	96
UCSF Library Stanton A. Glantz collection	13