Merritt Digital Preservation Repository – October 2023

October 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 October 2023

New Content and Collections

UC Berkeley School of Law, Robbins Collection

The Robbins Collection special collections library at the UC Berkeley Law school has embarked on a project to digitize over 275 manuscripts, the majority of which are medieval. We are pleased to say that the first batch of manuscripts has been completely processed and ingested into Merritt. The Library expects to send us a second batch of manuscripts for submission in the near future.

UC Riverside

This month we’ve continued to establish new Nuxeo-to-Merritt direct deposits for UC Riverside Library. The contents of over a dozen new collections have ingested. These include many Library Special Collections and University Archives holdings, as well several from the Water Resources Collections & Archives.

EarthArXiv and EcoEvoRxiv Preprints

We’re excited to announce that through a collaboration with CDL’s Published, Archives and Digitization team preprint publications from both EarthArXiv and EcoEvoRxiv are now being preserved in Merritt! As preprints from both organizations are published in eScholarship, they are also submitted to Merritt. Learn more about the partnerships established between EarthArXiv, EcoEvoRxiv and CDL.

Digital Preservation Community

The NDSA Storage Infrastructure Working Group has released its 2023 Storage Survey. The survey will run from October 24 through November 22. As noted in the working group’s survey announcement:

“This is the fourth iteration of the survey, the goal of which is not only to collect updated data for comparison with the 2011, 2013, and 2019 surveys, but to gather information on how new technologies and standards have impacted preservation storage. The information gathered through the previous three surveys has been an invaluable resource, helping those involved in digital preservation programs understand how preservation storage is changing and developing. As with the prior surveys, the aggregated results of the survey will be openly available.”

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 Ingest, Inventory and Audit microservices are now able to generate data that allows us to visualize trends in the operation of these services.

We are also continuing work on a prototype that allows for the introspection of the contents of individual collections in terms of file types, objects and object metadata vis-à-vis a series of considerations or factors to highlight where improvements could be made. We’ve begun to experiment with classifying different types of metadata, highlighting the presence and absence of object-level metadata, as well as identifying and categorizing the composition of certain objects. We’re excited to share this work with campus partners in the upcoming weeks.

Repository Metrics for October

Holdings Snapshot

Holdings as of July 1, 2023, fiscal year start:	479.45 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of October 30, 2023	571.69 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of September 28, 2023	558.66 TB
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 October (new files added – a single digital object can contain one or more files):

eScholarship	140,283
CDL EarthArXiv Preprint Collection	3,558
CDL EcoEvoRxiv Preprint Collection	1,988
Dryad	26,414
University and Jepson Herbaria Image Archive	4,956
UCB Library California Audio-Visual Preservation Project (CAVPP)	124
UCLA Library ETDs	52
UCR Library ETDs	258
UC Riverside Library Nuxeo collection	39,186
UCSC Library ETD	39
UCSD Library ETD	226
UCSF Library Stanton A. Glantz collection	20