Merritt Digital Preservation Repository – April 2024

April 29, 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 April 2024

New Content and Collections

New UC Santa Cruz Collections established in Merritt

The UC Santa Cruz Library Special Collections & Archives department has undertaken a major AV preservation project that involves digitization of AV materials. The initial collections have now been established in Merritt for use during the project. Some of these collections (16 in all), include:

UCSC Library Grateful Dead records: Artwork MS332 Ser. 9
UCSC Library Harry Mayo Surfing Photography collection MS405
UCSC Library John E. Thorne papers MS423
UCSC Library Miriam Patchen papers MS161
UCSC Library Morley Baer Photographs MS006
UCSC Library Nina Graboi papers MS225

Deaccessioned Content

For Merritt, the month of April saw the deaccessioning of Dryad content from the repository (completed on April 10). During the 5-year Dryad and CDL partnership, Merritt provided the digital preservation element of Dryad by preserving datasets across three cloud storage nodes: AWS S3, Glacier and San Diego Supercomputer Center Qumulo. With Dryad now a fully independent organization, all datasets, amounting to 154TB of content, were deleted from Merritt-managed storage. The Holdings Snapshot below reflects this action. As it moves forward, Dryad continues to be a resource that’s freely available to all UC researchers for housing research datasets.

Digital Preservation Community

Library of Congress gathering

On April 15-16, the Library of Congress conducted its annual Designing Storage Architectures meeting, gathering together a number of industry and digital preservation community representatives to discuss new and existing solutions and technologies in use across the commercial providers and academic institutions. Members of the Merritt team attended to present our recent work on object analysis which leverages Amazon Opensearch. Our presentation, as well as supporting videos can be found at merritt.cdlib.org/presentations. All presentations will be posted in May on the LOC Digital Preservation Meetings & Events page.

Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Americas

The Digital Preservation Coalition has launched a new program of work in the U.S. in support of its member organizations that reside in the Americas. Find out more about the program by watching a lightning talk that was presented by Jon Dunn (Indiana University Libraries) as part of CNI’s 2024 Project Briefings series in March (starts at 25:36).

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

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.

Repository Metrics for April

Holdings Snapshot

Holdings as of July 1, 2023, fiscal year start:	479.45 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of April 29, 2024	454.66 (one copy)
Holdings as of March 28, 2024	607.96 TB
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 April (new files added – a single digital object can contain one or more files):

Dryad – Deaccessioned	-2,731,075
eScholarship	99,056
University and Jepson Herbaria Image Archive	6,141
UC Berkeley Library Panama-Pacific International Exposition	839
UC Santa Cruz Library Morley Baer Photographs MS006	155
UCSD Library ETDs	143