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Merritt is awarded a Mojgan Amini Operational Excellence Award at UC Tech 2022

We are excited to announce that Merritt, CDL’s digital preservation repository, has been awarded the Mojgan Amini Operational Excellence Award.  This recognition comes at a time when the Merritt team continues to witness exponential growth in content submission from across the UC system. 

As the Awards committee highlighted: “Today, Merritt manages close to two and a half times the amount of data it did in 2019. It does so through more reliable, transparent, efficient and cost-effective means that aim to mitigate the risk of data loss while providing content access in perpetuity.” 

Storage Occupied by One Object Copy of all Content in Merritt

Through this award, we are demonstrating that success as a digital preservation system is not measured solely by an increase in content. The Merritt team’s efforts between 2019 and present day highlight how a focus on technical refactoring, workflow automation, and process optimization efforts benefit not only our current users, but those in the future as well.

We are thankful to the UC Tech Award committee for recognizing our transformative work and technical achievements. We know that Merritt must not only be a robust and stable platform that serves the University community, but it should also be able to adapt to new policies and advances in technologies, all the while being a straightforward system to maintain. Though our tasks as content and system stewards will never be finished – after all, digital preservation is truly a journey rather than a race – what follows is a  summary of our recent efforts and their results. 

Merritt’s usage cost was lowered from $650/TB to $150/TB, while the number of replicas for every digital object in the system increased from two to three copies. 

The standing file audit (a.k.a. fixity check) cycle was reduced to a third of the time necessary to fixity check all data in the repository.

The rate of new deposits has increased significantly since 2019, such that holdings have more than doubled. 

Reduction of the number of local data copies in play across cloud storage and microservices has increased the rate of new content ingest.

Increased sustainability has been achieved through implementation of system assertions and added system transparency.

Steps have been taken toward system scalability, including the streamlining of microservice configuration.