Merritt Digital Preservation Repository – January 2025

January 30, 2025 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 January 2025

Content and Collections

UC Irvine Library Special Collections – Jacques Derrida Papers

Members of UC Irvine Library’s Special Collections and Archives met with the Merritt team to coordinate on the deposit of materials from the Library’s Jacques Derrida Papers collection. While staging content locally, they’ve begun to use a “manifest of manifests” approach to batch submissions. This allows for gathering files and descriptive metadata of a single object using a manifest. And then in turn to submit multiple objects by referencing their corresponding manifests in a top-level manifest list.

UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies Library – Update

Members of the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies Library (IGSL), UC Berkeley Library IT and the Merritt team regrouped in January to discuss logistics and object composition associated with depositing the first of three new IGSL collections. In March we’ll be leveraging our new ingest workspace to automate the process of merging archival image files with metadata according to the physical arrangement of the collection. The workspace will also generate manifests for submission to Merritt.

Digital Preservation Community

Continuing Discussions on Digital Preservation in the Cloud

At iPRES 2024 a panel discussion centered on a variety of experiences with use of cloud offerings and storage for digital preservation. These discussions continue as organizations consider the notion of operating entirely in the cloud, potentially without a local, on-premises copy of their digital collections. The most recent NDSA Storage Survey reported “heavy use of an onsite storage element…by academic institutions (91%), archives (88%), and government agencies (71%). However, we may see this change over the coming years, depending on a number of variables. The Merritt system has stored all of its copies in the cloud for some time now and we look forward to joining new discussions with other organizations who have similar experience, or those looking for more information on the subject. Last month’s NDSA Standards & Practices Interest Group hosted a lively meeting on this topic – their meeting notes are available here!

What We’re Working On

New AWS Java SDK 2.0 and Refactoring Merritt Admin

Although it doesn’t happen often (rewind to 2010 when the AWS SDK for Java 1.0 was introduced), major version updates to Amazon’s SDK that enables programmatic communication with S3 are inevitable. Lately we have spent considerable time testing use of v2.0 of the SDK for Java across all three of our cloud storage providers, so we’ll be ready Amazon ends support for v1.0 in December of 2025.

We’re also refactoring the administrative layer for the repository which produces a number of reports and allows for control over many ingest, inventory, replication and audit operations. This is part of our migration to a new UC3 AWS account over which we’ll have more granular control of infrastructure.

Repository Metrics for January

Holdings Snapshot

Holdings as of July 1, 2024, fiscal year start:	468.8 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of January 30, 2025	509.96 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of October 30, 2024	492.02 TB
Holdings as of September 27, 2024	489.33 TB
Holdings as of August 29, 2024	471.27 TB
Holdings as of July 30, 2024	470.19 TB
Holdings as of June 28, 2024	468.8 TB

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

eScholarship	194,955
University and Jepson Herbaria Image Archive	2,749
CDL EarthArXiv Preprint Collection	130
CDL EcoEvoRxiv Preprint Collection	84
UC Berkeley Library Bancroft Selections	65,815
UC Berkeley Library Oral Histories	1,001
UC Berkeley Library Map Collection	3,256
UC Berkeley Library Bancroft C. Hart Merriam Papers	12,882
UC Berkeley School of Law, Robbins Collection	575
UC Irvine SCA University Archives	234
UC Irvine SCA Special Collections	281
UC Irvine Library SCA University Publications	72
UC Irvine Library Jacques Derrida Papers	1,218
UC Riverside Library Nuxeo collection	43,795
UCSD Library ETD	297