Merritt Digital Preservation Repository – March 2025

March 27, 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 March 2025

Content and Collections

Active Collections in March

During the month of March, several collections across multiple campus libraries were actively being expanded upon:

UC Berkeley Library Japanese American Records 1930-1974
UC Berkeley School of Law, Robbins Collection
University and Jepson Herbaria Image Archive
UC Irvine SCA Orange County Regional History Collection
UC Irvine Library Jacques Derrida Papers
UC Merced Library Historical Photo Archive
UC Santa Cruz Library Kenneth S. Norris papers UA066
UC Santa Cruz Library Shakespeare Santa Cruz records UA041
UCSC Elephant Seal and other Pinniped Research records UA132
UCSC Feminist Studies Department records UA097

Digital Preservation Community

Library of Congress Designing Storage Architectures for Digital Collections meeting

The annual Library of Congress DSA meeting occurred on March 24-25. A variety of presentations took place regarding storage technologies and Library and community projects. These included advances in DNA storage presented by the DNA Storage Alliance, the pros and cons of LTO-9 and LTO-10 tape and significant advances in ceramic + glass data storage developed by Cerabyte. Presentations from the conference will be posted in the coming weeks (look for a link in next month’s post).

A number of pre-meeting reading selections were distributed, including:

“Bit List of Digitally Endangered Species Interim Report 2024”, Digital Preservation Coalition
“A Risk-Driven Approach to Bitstream Preservation”, Digital Preservation Coalition
“Energy, Digital Preservation and the Climate: Proactively Planning for an Uncertain Future”, Sibyl Schaefer
“File Fixity in the Cloud”, K.R. Rimkus
“Complete Delete”, Simson Garfinkel
“Learning Lessons from the Cyberattack”, British Library.

What We’re Working On

In our recent UC3 blog series post, we mentioned autoscaling Merritt’s microservice architecture for a number of reasons – principally to promote throughput when needed, but in turn to minimize the repository’s footprint, thus reducing our impact on the environment. The team has made great progress on this in the past month by instantiating a development stack of containers using Docker, in no small part due to leveraging our recently revamped queueing implementation. The dev stack serves as the initial model and proof of concept for both Merritt’s Stage and Production environments – meaning, a fully containerized Merritt repository system is now in our future.

Repository Metrics for March

Holdings Snapshot

Holdings as of July 1, 2024, fiscal year start:	468.8 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of March 27, 2025	564.84 TB (one copy)
Holdings as of February 27, 2025	536.42 TB
Holdings as of January 30, 2025	509.96 TB
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

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

eScholarship	125,992
University and Jepson Herbaria Image Archive	6,360
UC Berkeley Library Japanese American Records 1930-1974	15,547
UC Berkeley School of Law, Robbins Collection	60,789
UC Irvine SCA Orange County Regional History Collection	129
UC Irvine Library Jacques Derrida Papers	6,743
UC Merced Library Historical Photo Archive	53,987
UC Santa Cruz Library Kenneth S. Norris papers UA066	1,250
UC Santa Cruz Library Shakespeare Santa Cruz records UA041	137
UCSC Elephant Seal and other Pinniped Research records UA132	682
UCSC Feminist Studies Department records UA097	3,450