CDL’s UC3 program has just completed a flurry of hiring to fill four positions, two funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Joshua Hubbard and Bhavitavya (Bhavi) Vedula were hired to work on the DMPTool2 project, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.  Josh has jumped in head first, helping with requirements for the project.    We’re looking forward to his Rails expertise going forward.   Bhavi has more than five years of development experience, much of it with Ruby/Rails and JQuery-based user interfaces.  Most recently she was part of a bioinformatics research group at Northwestern University tracking childhood developmental health. 

Shirin Faenza has joined UC3 as developer on a one-year contract, initially working on Merritt user interface improvements.  She has more than three years of web application development experience, most recently with Seedchange, a platform for crowd sourcing technology startup venture capital investing.  She has also worked as a technical translator, converting the Linux Journal into her native Italian. 

Ken Weiss is a production systems administrator, coordinating operational policies and procedures for UC3 services.  He replaces Margaret Low, who retired in 2012.  Most recently Ken worked as a technical analyst and architect as a contractor.  Before that he was technical director for enterprise architecture at Charles Schwab.   Long term UC staff may recall Ken’s earlier stint at the CDL in 1999-2000 when he redeployed OAC, then a research project at UCB, as a CDL production service. 

Please welcome Josh, Bhavi, Shirin, and Ken!

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.

• 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’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.

Patricia Cruse, CDL’s Director of Digital Preservation (UC3), will be reducing her duties at the CDL between January 14 and June 30, 2013.  Trisha will be working remotely from Italy and Spain while she accompanies her husband on his sabbatical from the University of San Francisco (USF).  During this time Trisha will continue working on various initiatives on a limited basis and will be available via email at patricia.cruse@ucop.edu.   Please don’t hesitate to contact Trisha about work or great places to see or eat in Italy or Spain!

Rosalie Lack, who has returned to CDL to assume the duties of the Web Archiving Service (WAS) manager, will take on many of the responsibilities for the day-to-day running of UC3.  These include administrative and systemwide activities as well as budgetary, communication, outreach, marketing and UC3 team management.   Rosalie can be reached at rosalie.lack@ucop.edu.

Note that these are all customizable so don’t hesitate to give these your own personal touch AND if you do customize them please let us know and we can find a way to share them with your campus colleagues.  We also learned at the workshops that you want to hear what other campuses are doing so hopefully we can get these conversations started.

• We have made significant changes to Merritt’s Inventory micro-service architecture, which supports indexing of metadata records for search, browse, and display. The process involved transitioning from 4Store (an RDF-based database) to MySQL. This has greatly improved searching and browsing response time.
• We have improved support for very large objects (greater than 4GB) in Merritt. We discovered a few bottlenecks that impeded submission of large objects, and have eliminated those bottlenecks. We also added support for downloading very large objects. Since processing the request and downloading large objects can take several minutes, we now process the request and notify the end user via email when it’s ready to be downloaded.
• We added support for Datacite XML metadata in Merritt. Clients who use DOIs for their Merritt content can now supply Datacite XML, instead of ERC or Dublin Core XML. Merritt will process it and pass it along to EZID to register with Datacite. We’re working on documenting this feature, but please contact us with any questions.
• Over 4,800 Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) from 8 UC campuses have been submitted to Merritt. Of those, over 2,000 from 5 campuses are published in eScholarship.
• We hosted two 2-day workshops Nov 8-9 in Oakland and Nov 13-14 in Irvine. The workshops introduced library staff to basic data curation concepts, presented the challenges and solutions involved in delivering data curation services, provided information about UC3’s tools and services, and shared campus solutions and approaches to data curation services. 100 participants attended the workshops.

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 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.

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

The abstract describes the article’s content as follows: The National Science Foundation and other funding agencies now require researchers to include data management plans with new grant proposals. Faced with this requirement, researchers are looking to libraries for help with various aspects of research data management and curation, from creating data management plans to archiving and providing access to their research data. The University of California Libraries deliver a growing range of services and tools such as the DMPTool, EZID, Merritt, Web Archiving Service and campus-based data management programs. This article discusses these initiatives, tools, and methods for campus engagement and faculty outreach, plus opportunities and challenges in developing library data services.

Congratulations to Joan Starr (CDL), Perry Willett (CDL), Lisa Federer (UCLA), Claudia Horning (UCLA), and Mary Linn Bergstrom (UCSD) on their article.

The enhancements to Merritt are summarized on the UC3 Curation wiki <https://confluence.ucop.edu/display/Curation/Merritt+Enhancements+and+Developments>  Some of the key highlights:

• Merritt now supports public access to designated collections and objects.  Depositors can designate collections as “dark” or “light” archives, and can change the designation at any point. We also now have persistent URLs to object landing pages and to individual files that can be used in catalogs, finding aids and other external access systems.
• Merritt supports integration with the eXtensible Text Framework (XTF – http://www.cdlib.org/services/publishing/tools/xtf/) for search, browse, and delivery.  In collaboration with UC3, the DataShare program at UC San Francisco is deploying XTF to provide open access to data stored in Merritt.  DataShare will be conducting user testing on this integration, and plans on rolling out their site to the public in September.
• The Merritt administrative user interface for submitting digital objects has been streamlined and simplified.
• Depositors can now submit Dublin Core XML metadata records with digital objects instead of ERC records.
• Merritt now supports the display of click-through data use agreements for particular collections.  This functionality is being piloted with UCSF DataShare content.

We will demo all the new functionality, and have time for discussion. We look forward to demo’ing the new features!

Perry Willett and Adrian Turner