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

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

Recent Enhancements, News, and Activities

• We’ve posted a summary of Merritt development activities and target timeframes on the UC3 Curation wiki: https://confluence.ucop.edu/display/Curation/Home and will continue to use the wiki as a place to update the community on activities.

• In coordination with the UCLA Library and DiscoveryGarden, we are planning to move forward on work to integrate Islandora with Merritt.  UCLA will be conducting the development work using a forthcoming Islandora API, with consulting, testing, and project support from DiscoveryGarden and CDL.  Islandora is an open source digital asset management system currently under evaluation for implementation by the UCLA Library.  We are seeking to deploy Merritt as the preservation storage layer under Islandora’s Drupal-based system, in place of Fedora, which usually fills that role.   We will prepare documentation, to assist other Islandora implementers with this process, once the project is completed.

• Work is in-progress on enhancements to the Merritt user interface, to support public access to Merritt collections.  This has been identified as the top priority for Merritt development.  The designation of collections and/or objects to be exposed publicly is performed by providers, based on local policy decisions.  Merritt curators will be able to designate their collections publicly accessible, and users will have direct access to materials stored in Merritt.  We will hold a webinar to demo this new functionality, once it is available. 

• We are documenting how UC campus libraries are utilizing or planning to integrate Merritt within local workflows.  Brief case studies — including recent profiles of UC Santa Barbara, UC San Francisco, and UC Santa Cruz’s use of Omeka with other systems — are featured on our UC3 Curation wiki.  • The UC Irvine Libraries are now submitting the content from their DSpace repository, called UCISpace http://ucispace.lib.uci.edu/. These UCISpace collections include a number of resources from the Libraries’ special collections and archives.  Content will be submitted via the Merritt API.  Special thanks to the UC Irvine Libraries Digital Scholarship Service team, and to Matthew McKinley for his work to connect these two systems.

• We are in the process of contracting with the San Diego Supercomputer Center to utilize their cloud storage service. This will allow for further cost-savings and will extend the replication of content stored in Merritt. 

• We are continuing work on our self-audit of the Merritt repository, based upon the Trustworthy Repository Audit Certification (TRAC) checklist.  Information about policies and practices is being posted on the TRAC pages on our UC3 Curation wiki <https://confluence.ucop.edu/display/Curation/TRAC> and we encourage feedback and comments from the community. 

• We implemented a number of upgrades to our Ruby on Rails web application framework, which underlies a number of Merritt features and functions, and also added patches to our indexing system.

• DCXL project, sponsored by Microsoft Research and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, will enable the preservation and sharing of research data via Microsoft Excel. Merritt will be a storage node for this project, allowing researchers to save, share and preserve their data in Merritt.  We have been working with developers at Microsoft to permit the submission of Excel spreadsheets to Merritt.  You can read more about the DCXL project at http://dcxl.cdlib.org/?p=692

• We have staged collections that were formerly in the Digital Preservation Repository (DPR), for migration to Merritt.  This is in preparation of decommissioning the legacy DPR system.  We have contacted clients with collections in the DPR, to confirm whether or not they would like us to migrate their collections forward. Please contact us with any questions about this migration.

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

In this great TEDx talk, two Harvard researchers (Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden) discuss the insights they’ve gleaned from the Google N-gram Viewer. From the creation of a metric for censorship to the orthography of frustration, the presentation introduces ideas that could spark great research in the digital humanities and elsewhere. It’s fun to watch, too.

You can also try out your own N-grams!

The Scripps Library is one of many UC collections that have been digitized recently. Among others, thousands of books from the East Asian library at UCLA, the Science and Engineering library at UCSC, and the great variety of materials at NRLF are going online every month. The Mass Digitization group at CDL continues to coordinate and facilitate this work, and we are constantly surprised by its depth and breadth. You’ll find more information at Google and UCSD, and keep an eye out further updates from CDL on the next UC collections going digital!

The California Sea Lion (Image from UCSD Libraries)