Merritt Digital Preservation Repository – August 2024

August 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 August 2024

Content and Collections

Active Collections

During the month of August, the following collections were actively being expanded:

UC Berkeley Library Bancroft Selections
UC Berkeley Library Japanese Historical Maps
UC Berkeley School of Law, Robbins Collection
UC Davis ETDs
UCI Library ETDs
ULCA Library ETDs
The University and Jepson Herbaria Image Archive

Digital Preservation Community

Shift Collective decentralized storage for community-based archives

As part of a research initiative, the Shift Collective is establishing a pilot program through which community-based archives (CBAs) will use the Historypin platform to preserve a number of collections whose content will be stored in decentralized storage. This is an exciting effort to leverage decentralized storage for preservation purposes that directly benefits CBAs who are part of the larger Historypin network. More information on this initiative is available here, on the Shift Collective website.

“A low-tech solution for mediated delivery of born-digital materials”

In a recent bloggERS post titled, “A low-tech solution for mediated delivery of born-digital materials,” Keith Pendergrass details his work on a scripted method for packaging processed materials as BagIt bags that are ready for submission to the Harvard Digital Repository Service and then subsequently enables their delivery as a Dissemination Information Package (DIP) for use in a reading room environment. First presented in a lightening talk at the 2024 BitCurator Forum, the post reviews how Pendergrass’ solution helps preserve nested directory hierarchies in the Archival Information Package (AIP) and leverages two manifests which document access and delivery restrictions. More information is available at the project’s GitHub repository and via his original lightning talk slides.

What We’re Working On

Ingest Queue Design

Merritt’s redesigned Ingest and Inventory implementation is now being tested in our Stage environment and nears its production release! The new design is being implemented as part of a longstanding effort to 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. Rather than only acknowledging when a submission is queued and completed, the system will now provide control over a number of intermediate steps including Estimation (of staging space to be used), Downloading, Processing, Recording and Notification. The end goal of the rearchitected design, while enabling control and recovery from any one of these steps, is to lay the groundwork for autoscaling Merritt’s Ingest service. Further information is available on queue states and state transition details is available at the queueing library’s GitHub repository.

Repository Metrics for August

Holdings Snapshot

Holdings as of July 1, 2024, fiscal year start:	468.8 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of August 29, 2024	471.27 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of July 30, 2024	470.19 TB
Holdings as of June 28, 2024	468.8 TB
Holdings as of May 31, 2024	459.06 TB
Holdings as of April 29, 2024	454.66 TB
Deaccessioned Holdings (Dryad)	154.7 TB
Holdings as of March 28, 2024	607.96 TB

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

eScholarship	142,025
University and Jepson Herbaria Image Archive	2,468
UC Berkeley Library Bancroft Selections	1,477
UC Berkeley Library Japanese Historical Maps	307
UC Berkeley School of Law, Robbins Collection	9,189
UC Davis ETD	511
UCI Library ETD	525
UCLA Library ETDs	125