• Work is in-progress and on track for the following high priority development activities, slated for completion this summer:
• Migrate Merritt’s underlying technical infrastructure from physical servers to Virtual Machines (VM). (All UCOP services are moving to VMs.) We expect this work to be completed in June 2013.
• Migrate collections from the legacy Digital Preservation Repository (DPR) to Merritt.
• Transition storage from UCOP Data Center to San Diego Supercomputer Center’s Cloud Storage Service.
• The Merritt development team also implemented a routine upgrade to the web applications underlying Merritt (Ruby on Rails).
• UC Berkeley Library added over 4 TB of content to Merritt in May. There is currently over 8 TB of collections within Merritt, total, comprising resources deposited from UC campus libraries and campus departments.
• On Tuesday May 21 at 3:00PM (PT), there was a general UCOP (UC Office of the President) network outage which impacted connectivity for CDL operations and services including Merritt. This outage lasted approximately 1 hour. It did not have any effect on data stored in Merritt. There was some impact on content being submitted at the time of the outage. We have addressed those issues and have ingested all the submissions that were affected. Please contact us at uc3@ucop.edu with any questions or concerns about this network outage.

For a current summary of 2013 development priorities for 2013, see the UC3 Curation Wiki: http://bit.ly/16O0hGK.

Merritt Service Description
Merritt is a production level service that provides the UC community with an easy to use tool to manage, archive, and share their content. Content can be deposited and managed via a user-interface or an API.

Merritt Service Managers

• Perry Willett perry.willett@ucop.edu
• Adrian Turner adrian.turner@ucop.edu

Please send any questions or general correspondence to uc3@ucop.edu.

Merritt Training Materials, Guides, FAQs and Webinars
More information about Merritt is available at http://www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/merritt or by sending an inquiry to uc3@ucop.edu.

Service Monitoring and Availability
Check CDL’s system status page at http://www.cdlib.org/contact/system.html.

Recent Enhancements, News, and Activities

• Development status: The requirements document has been finalized. Our developers are working on the new administrative features. We’re working with a UI specialist at Purdue and a design firm in Virginia on the design of the interface.
• DMPTool webinar series: The first webinar, an introduction to the DMPTool, was presented on May 28. There were over 140 registrants who attended. It’s likely that a good many more actually attended as some groups met and called in using a shared phone. The slides and recording, as well as the schedule of upcoming webinars, are available here:
  http://blogs.library.ucla.edu/dmptool/webinar-series/.
• New team member:
  • Dan Phipps has been hired to work 50% on the IMLS grant as Outreach Coordinator. He’ll be working closely with Carly Strasser to develop resources for librarians to help in data management.
• There were over 200 data management plans created in May 2013, and 228 new users. There are a total of over 5,400 registered users from over 700 institutions, who have created over 4,700 data management plans.

Contributing Organizations
There are now 87 partner institutions that have either configured their campus single-signon or customized the DMPTool for their users. There are participating organizations in 34 states and the District of Columbia; California leads all states with 18 participating organizations. A map of all participating organizations is available here: http://bit.ly/L85sKj.

DMPTool Service Description
The Data Management Plan Tool (DMPTool) provides an easy to use interface that:

• Helps users create ready-to-use data management plans for specific funding agencies
• Meets funder requirements for data management plans
• Provides step-by-step instructions and guidance for how to manage data
• Provides information about resources and services available at your institution to help fulfill the data management requirements of your grant

DMPTool Service Managers

• Perry Willett perry.willett@ucop.edu
• Carly Strasser carly.strasser@ucop.edu
• Trisha Cruse patricia.cruse@ucop.edu

Please send any questions or general correspondence to uc3@ucop.edu. Note that campus library contacts have been embedded in the DMPTool and campus users will be directed to a local library contact.

DMPTool Training Materials, Guides, FAQs and Webinars
Help Guide: https://dmp.cdlib.org/help/guide.

Service Monitoring and Availability
Check CDL’s system status page at http://www.cdlib.org/contact/system.html.

Recent Enhancements, News, and Activities

• DMPTool webinar series: The first webinar, an introduction to the DMPTool, will be May 28.
• Register for the webinar: http://bit.ly/Z4g43Z
• Read more about the webinar series: http://blogs.library.ucla.edu/dmptool/webinar-series/
• We’ve created two advisory boards for the DMPTool, a Researcher Advisory Board and an Administrative Advisory Board. More about the advisory boards, with membership, here:
  http://blogs.library.ucla.edu/dmptool/2013/04/11/advisory-boards-established/.
• We’ve updated the data management requirements for the NSF Biological Sciences directorate. We contacted everyone who had customized this template for their institution. You will find more information about the changes here:
  http://blogs.library.ucla.edu/dmptool/2013/05/02/nsf-bio-dmp-updated.
• New team members:
• We hired a software developer, Bhavi Vedula, who will work on the changes to the
  DMPTool. She will be based in Oakland at CDL, and will begin May 1. She and our other
  new developer Josh Hubbard will begin to implement the requirements developed by
  the project team.
• There were 241 data management plans created in April 2013, and 287 new users. There are a total of over 5,200 registered users from over 700 institutions, who have created over 4,500 data management plans.

Contributing Organizations
There are now 83 partner institutions that have either configured their campus single‐signon or customized the DMPTool for their users. There are participating organizations in 34 states and the District of Columbia; California leads all states with 18 participating organizations. A map of all participating organizations is available here: http://bit.ly/L85sKj.

DMPTool Service Description
The Data Management Plan Tool (DMPTool) provides an easy to use interface that:

• Helps users create ready-to-use data management plans for specific funding agencies
• Meets funder requirements for data management plans
• Provides step-by-step instructions and guidance for how to manage data
• Provides information about resources and services available at your institution to help fulfill the data management requirements of your grant

DMPTool Service Managers

• Perry Willett perry.willett@ucop.edu
• Carly Strasser carly.strasser@ucop.edu
• Trisha Cruse patricia.cruse@ucop.edu

Please send any questions or general correspondence to uc3@ucop.edu. Note that campus library contacts have been embedded in the DMPTool and campus users will be directed to a local library contact.

DMPTool Training Materials, Guides, FAQs and Webinars
Help Guide: https://dmp.cdlib.org/help/guide.

Service Monitoring and Availability
Check CDL’s system status page at http://www.cdlib.org/contact/system.html.

Recent Enhancements, News, and Activities

• Work is in‐progress and on track to migrate Merritt’s underlying technical infrastructure from physical servers to Virtual Machines (VM). (All UCOP services are moving to VMs.) We expect this work to be completed in June 2013.
• The following related activities are also in‐progress and on track:
  • migrating collections from the legacy Digital Preservation Repository (DPR) to Merritt
  • transitioning storage from UCOP Data Center to San Diego Supercomputer Center’s Cloud Storage Service
• For a current summary of 2013 development priorities for 2013, see the UC3 Curation Wiki: http://bit.ly/16O0hGK.

Merritt Service Description
Merritt is a production level service that provides the UC community with an easy to use tool to manage, archive, and share their content. Content can be deposited and managed via a user-interface or an API.

Merritt Service Managers

• Perry Willett perry.willett@ucop.edu
• Adrian Turner adrian.turner@ucop.edu

Please send any questions or general correspondence to uc3@ucop.edu.

Merritt Training Materials, Guides, FAQs and Webinars
More information about Merritt is available at http://www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/merritt or by sending an inquiry to uc3@ucop.edu.

Service Monitoring and Availability
Check CDL’s system status page at http://www.cdlib.org/contact/system.html.

Recent Enhancements, News, and Activities

• An updated roadmap summarizing our 2013 development priorities for Merritt is now available on the UC3 Curation Wiki: http://bit.ly/16O0hGK
• We are continuing work towards migrating the backend Merritt server environment from physical servers to Virtual Machines (VM). All UCOP services are moving to VMs, and we believe that this will result in more stable services. We expect this work to be complete in June 2013.
• We are continuing to work on enhancements to Merritt’s underlying infrastructure, including:
• migrating collections from the legacy Digital Preservation Repository (DPR) to Merritt
• transitioning storage from UCOP Data Center to San Diego Supercomputer Center’s Cloud Storage Service
• We have two new options for email notification of Merritt submissions. The first is a comma separated values (CSV) file. CSV files can be easily imported into Microsoft Excel for manipulation and analysis. The other format is a more enduser‐friendly text message. Please contact us at uc3@ucop.edu if you’re interested in more information, or want to begin receiving notifications in these new formats.
• We now include a “readme.txt” file in the ZIP container file that explains where to find the data. Since we include system files and other content not originally submitted by the curator as part of the download, some users reported having trouble finding the actual data.

Merritt Service Description
Merritt is a production level service that provides the UC community with an easy to use tool to manage, archive, and share their content. Content can be deposited and managed via a user-interface or an API.

Merritt Service Managers

• Perry Willett perry.willett@ucop.edu
• Adrian Turner adrian.turner@ucop.edu

Please send any questions or general correspondence to uc3@ucop.edu.

Merritt Training Materials, Guides, FAQs and Webinars
More information about Merritt is available at http://www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/merritt or by sending an inquiry to uc3@ucop.edu.

Service Monitoring and Availability
Check CDL’s system status page at http://www.cdlib.org/contact/system.html.

Recent Enhancements, News, and Activities

• DMPTool webinar series: The first webinar, an introduction to the DMPTool, will be May 28.
• Register for the webinar: http://bit.ly/Z4g43Z
• Read more about the webinar series: http://bit.ly/12C9vWh
• We’ve created two advisory boards for the DMPTool, a Researcher Advisory Board and an Administrative Advisory Board. Both boards will review and advise on directions and
  functionality of the DMPTool and its overall value to researchers. We’re still finalizing the membership, and will announce the members soon.
• New team members:
• We hired a software developer, Joshua Hubbard, who will work on the changes to the
  DMPTool. He will be based in Oakland at CDL, and will begin April 1. Welcome Josh!
• We hired Daniel Phipps as part of the Institute of Museum and Library Services grant we received for 2013. Dan is working with Carly Strasser to develop materials for libraries to educate researchers about data management, using the DMPTool as a centerpiece. Dan is currently an MLIS student at UCLA and will graduate in June.
• There were 255 data management plans created in March 2013, and 190 new users. There are a total of almost 5,000 registered users from over 700 institutions, who have created over 4,200 data management plans.

Contributing Organizations
There are now 82 partner institutions that have either configured their campus single‐signon or customized the DMPTool for their users. There are participating organizations in 34 states and the District of Columbia; California leads all states with 18 participating organizations. A map of all participating organizations is available here: http://bit.ly/L85sKj.

DMPTool Service Description
The Data Management Plan Tool (DMPTool) provides an easy to use interface that:

• Helps users create ready-to-use data management plans for specific funding agencies
• Meets funder requirements for data management plans
• Provides step-by-step instructions and guidance for how to manage data
• Provides information about resources and services available at your institution to help fulfill the data management requirements of your grant

DMPTool Service Managers

• Perry Willett perry.willett@ucop.edu
• Carly Strasser carly.strasser@ucop.edu
• Trisha Cruse patricia.cruse@ucop.edu

Please send any questions or general correspondence to uc3@ucop.edu. Note that campus library contacts have been embedded in the DMPTool and campus users will be directed to a local library contact.

DMPTool Training Materials, Guides, FAQs and Webinars
Help Guide: https://dmp.cdlib.org/help/guide.

Service Monitoring and Availability
Check CDL’s system status page at http://www.cdlib.org/contact/system.html.

• We are migrating the backend Merritt server environment from physical servers to Virtual Machines (VM). All UCOP services are moving to VMs, and we believe that this will result in more stable services. We expect this work to be complete in June 2013.
• We are also continuing to work on enhancements to Merritt’s underlying infrastructure, including:
  • extending the MySQL-based Inventory service to improve search and display of Merritt content
  • migrating collections from the legacy Digital Preservation Repository (DPR) to Merritt
  • transitioning storage infrastructure to San Diego Supercomputer Center’s cloud storage

  We are finalizing a roadmap summarizing high-level development and programmatic priorities for Merritt for 2013, and will be posting the information this month on the UC3 Curation Wiki.

• The open-source code base for a number of Merritt micro-services (Storage, Ingest, and Fixity) is now available on BitBucket: https://bitbucket.org/merritt/. The code base for other micro-services, along with documentation, will be added as we complete packaging them for distribution.
• The Merritt METS Feeder ingest process has been updated; identifiers encoded within submitted METS files — or within descriptive metadata records, embedded within the METS — will not be automatically recognized and handled as unique, local identifiers within Merritt. Previously, institutions submitted METS records with local identifiers that were not necessarily unique (e.g., collection or call numbers) causing submission errors.
• On Thursday February 28 at 1:29 PM (PT), there was a general UCOP (UC Office of the President) network outage which impacted connectivity for CDL operations and services including Merritt. At 2:33 PM, we received word from the UCOP systems office that the UCOP network was coming back online. A second interruption occurred around 3 PM, although that outage was resolved within a few minutes.This outage did not have any effect on data stored in Merritt. There was some impact on content being submitted at the time of the outage. We have addressed those issues and have ingested all the submissions that were affected. Please contact us at uc3@ucop.edu with any questions or concerns about this network outage.

Merritt Service Description
Merritt is a production level service that provides the UC community with an easy to use tool to manage, archive, and share their content. Content can be deposited and managed via a user-interface or an API.

Merritt Service Managers

• Perry Willett perry.willett@ucop.edu
• Adrian Turner adrian.turner@ucop.edu

Please send any questions or general correspondence to uc3@ucop.edu.

Merritt Training Materials, Guides, FAQs and Webinars
More information about Merritt is available at http://www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/merritt or by sending an inquiry to uc3@ucop.edu.

Service Monitoring and Availability
Check CDL’s system status page at http://www.cdlib.org/contact/system.html.

• We held two project meetings in February to discuss the grants we received from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and IMLS. A blogpost at the DMPTool blog describes the meetings, and links to reports and other information:
  https://blogs.library.ucla.edu/dmptool/2013/03/07/kickoff-meetings-for-newly-funded-dmptool-projects/.
• DMTool has set up Facebook and Twitter accounts; consider following to stay informed. Facebook: http://on.fb.me/YLvVD0 and Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheDMPTool.
• On Thursday February 28 at 1:29 PM (PT), there was a general UCOP (UC Office of the President) network outage which impacted connectivity for CDL operations and services including the DMPTool. At 2:33 PM, we received word from the UCOP systems office that the UCOP network was coming back online. A second interruption occurred around 3 PM, although that outage was resolved within a few minutes.This outage did not have any effect on data management plans already created. Please contact us at uc3@ucop.edu with any questions or concerns about this network outage.

Contributing Organizations
There are now more than 80 partner institutions that have either configured their campus single-signon or customized the DMPTool for their users. There are participating organizations in 34 states and the District of Columbia; California leads all states with 18 participating organizations. A map of all participating organizations is available here: http://bit.ly/L85sKj.

DMPTool Service Description
The Data Management Plan Tool (DMPTool) provides an easy to use interface that:

• Helps users create ready-to-use data management plans for specific funding agencies
• Meets funder requirements for data management plans
• Provides step-by-step instructions and guidance for how to manage data
• Provides information about resources and services available at your institution to help fulfill the data management requirements of your grant

DMPTool Service Managers

• Perry Willett perry.willett@ucop.edu
• Carly Strasser carly.strasser@ucop.edu

Please send any questions or general correspondence to uc3@ucop.edu. Note that campus library contacts have been embedded in the DMPTool and campus users will be directed to a local library contact.

DMPTool Training Materials, Guides, FAQs and Webinars
Help Guide: https://dmp.cdlib.org/help/guide

Service Monitoring and Availability
Check CDL’s system status page at http://www.cdlib.org/contact/system.html.

• As announced in last month’s update, the DMPTool partners were awarded $590,000 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for further development of the DMPTool. Specifically, the grant will fund enhancements and extensions to the current functionality, including these items:
• Promote the practice of data management, sharing, and preservation, emphasizing the utility of best practices beyond meeting funder requirements
• Enable institutions to easily shape and exploit the DMPTool to meet local need
• Foster the emergence of an engaged open source community of DMPTool users and developers
• Maintain transparency in all project activities to facilitate community involvement
• Increase the depth and breadth of the tool’s coverage for funder and institutional data management requirements
• Enable collaboration and connect stakeholders to each other and institutional resources, including services, expertise and guidance
• Provide support for the full data management life cycle, including provision for collaborative plan authorship, and review and reporting by institutional administrators

For more information, see the press release. As part of this grant, we are now seeking two software developers.

• There were 307 data management plans created in January 2013, the second highest month so far. We also had 349 new users, bringing the total to over 4300.
• The DMPTool experienced an outage on Saturday January 12 through Monday morning, January 14. There was a scheduled maintenance on Saturday January 12 and Sunday January 13 that took longer than expected. On Sunday evening, there was a problem with CDL’s high availability management software (VCS), causing most CDL services to be unavailable. The data management plans stored by the DMPTool were never affected, but access was not possible during this time. The problem was resolved on Monday morning, January 14.

Contributing Organizations
3 more universities configured their Shibboleth identity providers for the DMPTool in January, bringing the total to 72. 1 university added customizations, bringing the total number of partner institutions to 80. There are participating organizations in 34 states and the District of Columbia; California leads all states with 18 participating organizations. A map of all participating organizations is available here: http://bit.ly/L85sKj.

DMPTool Service Description
The Data Management Plan Tool (DMPTool) provides an easy to use interface that:

• Helps users create ready-to-use data management plans for specific funding agencies
• Meets funder requirements for data management plans
• Provides step-by-step instructions and guidance for how to manage data
• Provides information about resources and services available at your institution to help fulfill the data management requirements of your grant

DMPTool Service Manager

• Perry Willett perry.willett@ucop.edu
• Carly Strasser carly.strasser@ucop.edu
• Trisha Cruse patricia.cruse@ucop.edu

Please send any questions or general correspondence to uc3@ucop.edu. Note that campus library contacts have been embedded in the DMPTool and campus users will be directed to a local library contact.

DMPTool Training Materials, Guides, FAQs and Webinars
Help Guide: https://dmp.cdlib.org/help/guide.

Service Monitoring and Availability
Check CDL’s system status page at http://www.cdlib.org/contact/system.html.

• We’ve just created a listserv, merritt-l@ucop.edu. We will use the listserv to communicate with Merritt users, particularly with information about scheduled or unscheduled maintenances. We’ve added many people already working with Merritt (and you’ll have received a notification from the listserv if you’ve been added). If you’d like to be added to the listserv, please contact us at uc3@ucop.edu.
• As a follow-up to the UC3 workshops in November, we are working on a Roadmap listing our priorities for Merritt. The Roadmap will list the software development we will be working on in the coming 12-18 months. Look for the Roadmap in February.
• We implemented a new version of Inventory in response to the problems we were experiencing in the fall. Inventory is the micro-service that stores metadata about the content in Merritt, and provides those metadata records to the user interface when needed for display and reporting. The original Inventory used 4Store to store the records, but it did not provide the level of performance we needed. We have just switched to MySql, and are finding that the performance is much better. We’re seeing much faster response times in many of the tasks requiring Inventory. We’re working on a extending this MySql implementation over the coming months, which will provide even better performance in the future. The schedule for this new enhanced Inventory will be announced as part of the Roadmap discussed above.

Service Description
Merritt is a production level service that provides the UC community with an easy to use tool to manage, archive, and share their content. Content can be deposited and managed via a user-interface or an API.

Training Materials, Guides, FAQs and Webinars
More information about Merritt is available at http://www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/merritt or by sending an inquiry to uc3@ucop.edu.

See also Merritt webinars: http://www.cdlib.org/services/uc3/uc3webinars.html.

Service Monitoring and Availability
Check CDL’s system status page at http://www.cdlib.org/contact/system.html.

Merritt Service Managers
Perry Willett perry.willett@ucop.edu and Adrian Turner adrian.turner@ucop.edu or uc3@ucop.edu.