Merritt Digital Preservation Repository – March 2024

March 28, 2024 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 March 2024

New Content and Collections

Upcoming UC Santa Cruz Collections

The UC Santa Cruz Library Special Collections & Archives department has undertaken a major AV preservation project that involves digitization of AV materials. Preservation of the resulting files and objects will take place in Merritt. A sampling of these collections includes:

Sara Halprin interviews MS153
League of Women Voters of Santa Cruz County records MS286
Frank Kofsky Audio and Photo Collection of the Jazz and Rock Movement MS312
Grateful Dead records: Media MS332 Ser. 7
Esther Rice collection of Santa Cruz photographs MS367

Files captured in the collections throughout the project will follow guidelines set forth in
the University of California Libraries Digital Reformatting Guidelines.

New UCSF Library Collections

In 2022, 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.” Since December 2023, five new collections have been established in Merritt to preserve the archival content associated with this project.

UCSF Library MSS 86-54 Leona Meyer Bayer Collection
UCSF Library MSS 2014-17 Helen Fahl Gofman Papers
UCSF Library MSS 83-18 Carol Hardgrove Papers
UCSF Library MSS 83-9 Selma Fraiberg Papers
UCSF Library MSS 89-67 Hulda Evelyn Thelander Papers

Access to these collections is provided through Calisphere.

Digital Preservation Community

In March, the NDSA Infrastructure Interest Group welcomed Dr. Lise Jaillant of Loughborough University and Glen Layne-Worthey of the University of Illinois who led a discussion on the AEOLIAN Network, which was “designed to investigate the role that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can play to make born-digital and digitised cultural records more accessible to users.” Outcomes of the project include workshops, case studies and a wide range of publications. A meeting recording will soon be posted to the group’s YouTube playlist.

Upcoming call for proposals deadline

Proposals for iPRES 2024 lightning talks, posters, digital preservation games, birds of a feather and demo sessions are due May 15. For more information, visit the conference website.

What We’re Working On

Object Analysis Prototype

The Merritt team continues 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. We have been reaching out to campus partners to discuss this work and to review sample content in the system. We’re excited by the feedback we’ve gained and look forward to integrating it into our approach to the project as it progresses.

The prototype allows for analyzing a number of object and metadata 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.

Ingest Queue Design

The team is now deep into the design and implementation phases to update Merritt’s queueing process which takes place when new content is ingested into the repository and database entries are subsequently recorded in its inventory. The new design is being implemented as part of a longstanding effort introduce more transparency into the repository’s ingest operations which in turn will provide much more granular feedback to depositors in terms of submission status. Further detail is available on upcoming queue states and state transition details.

Feel free to reach out to us with any questions on our current projects!

Repository Metrics for March

Holdings Snapshot

Holdings as of July 1, 2023, fiscal year start:	479.45 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of March 28, 2024	607.96 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of November 30, 2023	576.43 TB
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

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

eScholarship	154,924
University and Jepson Herbaria Image Archive	5,818
UC Berkeley Library Bancroft Selections	33,320
UC Berkeley Library EAL Books	14,875
UCLA Library ETDs	248