Merritt Digital Preservation Repository – November 2023

November 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 November 2023

New Content and Collections

Upcoming UCSF Library Collections

Last year, UCSF Archives & Special Collections announced that “it was awarded a grant by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) in support of the project titled, Pioneering Child Studies: Digitizing and Providing Access to Collection of Women Physicians who Spearheaded Behavioral and Developmental Pediatrics.” In the coming weeks, five new collections will be created in Merritt to preserve the archival content associated with this project. Access to these collections is provided through Calisphere.

UC Riverside

As during October, 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.

Digital Preservation Community

A new Climate Watch Working Group is being launched by the NDSA! The group will “will scan and report on the most recent literature, news, and reports related to climate change and its impact on digital preservation.” Per its page on the NDSA website, the group’s goals include:

Producing regular annotated bibliographies on recent literature, news, and reports related to climate change and its impact on digital preservation
Creating and adding to an ongoing list of potential risks climate change poses to digital preservation work
Creating and adding to lists of core climate change information resources to get a solid grounding in the issue, help with future projections, and lobby for preservation resources

What We’re Working On

The Merritt team is continuing its work on a prototype that allows for the introspection of the contents of individual collections in terms of file types, objects and object metadata. A limited number of objects from each of Merritt’s collections has now been loaded into the prototype and can be reviewed based on a number of factors, including but not limited to:

Classifying different types of metadata
Highlighting the presence and absence of object-level metadata
Identifying and categorizing the composition of certain objects
Identifying file extension to MIME type mismatches, where the application of characterization tools such as DROID and JHOVE is beneficial for further investigation.

We’re excited to share this work with campus partners in the upcoming weeks.

Repository Metrics for November

Holdings Snapshot

Holdings as of July 1, 2023, fiscal year start:	479.45 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of November 30, 2023	576.43 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of October 30, 2023	571.69 TB
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 November (new files added – a single digital object can contain one or more files):

eScholarship	11,068
CDL EarthArXiv Preprint Collection	104
CDL EcoEvoRxiv Preprint Collection	80
Dryad	39,979
University and Jepson Herbaria Image Archive	5,915
UCI Library ETDs	310
UC Riverside Library Nuxeo collection	14,138