UC3 New Year Series: Digital Preservation in 2026

At UC3, we’re dedicated to advancing the fields of digital curation, digital preservation, and open data practices. Over the years, we’ve built and supported a range of services and actively led and collaborated on initiatives to open scholarship. With this in mind, we’re kicking off a new series of blog posts to highlight our core areas of work and where we’re heading in 2026.

Welcome to UC3’s 2026 New Year blog post series! This first post dives into the team’s engagement with all things digital preservation, along with its further development of CDL’s digital preservation repository, Merritt.

• On the repository front, we’ll discuss how the accomplishments of 2025 have aligned us to complete a major revamp of repository infrastructure in 2026 that promotes security best practices, eases management and reduces environmental impact while also addressing varying rates of deposit.
  
• With regard to community and campus engagement, we’ll review the outputs of the Digital Preservation Working Group and how these can promote new and enhanced practices and collaboration surrounding the preservation of digital materials.
  
• We’ll also note engagement in an external, Library of Congress-driven effort surrounding content provenance and authenticity that could benefit publications being preserved in Merritt.
  
• And, specifically for the Merritt team, we’ll talk about what it means for us to again take on the task of renewing our CoreTrustSeal certification.

Moving Merritt into the Realm of Containerization

Although our team has always been improving the Merritt repository with an eye on operational efficiency, security, transparency and durability, it was not until 2025 that we really entered the beginning of a major paradigm shift with how the system functions. This shift entails movement of Merritt’s microservices and queueing system into a fully containerized state. 

What’s in a container and why are we making this shift?

In essence, a container is a fully functional and portable cloud computing environment that surrounds an application. Inside a container, an application such as Merritt’s Ingest microservice has all of the resources it needs to run – including a common operating system, an allocation of memory, configuration files and any required software libraries and dependencies. As a result, the new Merritt system will be composed of a series of small, light-weight, secure containers that complete processing significant amounts of incoming, archival content more quickly.

That’s also to say, going forward, each Merritt service will no longer operate on a customized, often expensive AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance. Instead, services will operate in containers that are orchestrated (i.e. automatically managed) by Amazon’s Elastic Container Service (ECS). 

There are numerous advantages of running Merritt using this new strategy and infrastructure. First and foremost, it allows microservices to scale according to the activity of depositors. In other words, when multiple depositors have sent multi-gigabyte or multi-terrabyte batches to ingest, Merritt’s Ingest and Storage microservices will scale up as needed – meaning more containers that operate the software that performs ingest and storage operations will be started automatically. 

And, as opposed to manually requesting additional, more costly EC2 instances be instantiated temporarily by DevOps, each new container spins up via ECS automatically in minutes – with the latest operating system and dependency updates already in place. Just as importantly, once the load on these services reduces, unneeded containers will be automatically spun down. Doing so keeps the repository’s overall footprint as small as possible. Fewer unused compute resources means less power consumption and heat generation at data centers, and in turn lowered impact on the environment. 

Given all these benefits, we are incredibly excited to be within reach of our containerization goal. Merritt’s administrative service has already been containerized and its UI is next on the list. After that, we’ll move Merritt’s Audit and Replication services to containers, followed by Inventory, Ingest, Storage and finally ZooKeeper. Throughout the year, we’ll keep you informed of our progress through upcoming, monthly CDL INFO newsletter posts.

Community Engagement

At the end of 2025, the UC Libraries Digital Preservation Working Group (DPWG) completed its charge. By year’s end the group had submitted both a comprehensive gap analysis and a new digital preservation framework to the Direction and Oversight Committee (DOC) in final form. 

The gap analysis, based on the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Rapid Assessment Model (DPC RAM), allowed the team to evaluate to what degree main campus libraries met multiple criteria considered key to good digital preservation practices. The gap analysis subgroup effectively transformed the RAM maturity model into a survey instrument, gathering over 50 responses from participants.

As the gap analysis was underway, a separate DPWG subgroup reviewed existing digital preservation frameworks from a number academic institutions and consortia. This group evaluated which framework elements were most applicable to the needs of UC campus libraries. Frameworks and associated documentation from ICPSR, University of Washington Libraries, Yale, Northwestern, and Harvard, among others, including our own campuses at San Diego and Santa Cruz were explored. 

What became evident during this process was that the forthcoming framework needed to be practicable by a large number of independently operating libraries with mixed resources and varying priorities – but with the added requirement to report back to a critical, long standing governance structure. In this case, the University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, or UCOLASC.

Through an iterative process that was informed by gap analysis results, a new digital preservation framework was created. Its key components include a range of operating principles, identification of potential campus designees and discussion surrounding shared services – specifically with a slant towards development involving collaborative design, transparent governance and inclusiveness of campus library voices.

Throughout the year, we look forward to collaborating with campus libraries on the introduction of the new framework and how they can potentially take advantage of what it has to offer.

Please note that both the gap analysis and framework have not yet been published, but links to them will be made available through this site when they become available!

Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA)

A few years ago a group of major players in the technology and media space including Adobe, Microsoft, Google, BBC and Sony began collaboration around what would become a public specification for the promotion of content authenticity and provenance. This specification and its implementation by vendors and organizations strives to provide the means to include a living manifest of metadata in digital materials. A C2PA manifest can record when a digital asset first came to be along with myriad changes that span the asset’s lifecycle. Such structured and secure metadata is purposed to record the provenance of the item while also describing the ongoing changes made to it by actors, be they human or machine. In essence, through purposeful metadata handling, it becomes possible to identify if the asset was altered or utilized in a fashion that was not intended by its creator and subsequent users.

Through engagement with the C2PA for G+LAM working group driven by members of the Library of Congress, the Merritt team has contributed to the development of a newly defined C2PA use case for Open Access journal publications, as well as a forthcoming, public call-to-action white paper addressing high-level issues related to AI and content authenticity and provenance. This latter deliverable is intended for cultural heritage administrators and practitioners. It will cover “potential risks and opportunities presented by recent AI technologies and outline potential directions for future collaborative research and experimental applications.” 

Stay tuned, as a draft should be posted for public comment in February.

Merritt’s CoreTrustSeal (re)Certification

This year we will re-apply for Merritt’s certification by CoreTrustSeal (CTS). At the same time, 2026 marks the beginning of a standard three year period where revised CTS requirements come into play. The upshot being that we will need to address many more requirements in comparison to Merritt’s last certification – which is a good thing!

In a similar vein the Merritt service manager (myself) has been part of the CTS Assembly of Reviewers, a group of nearly 100 individuals responsible for reviewing CTS submissions from repositories around the world. Which also means I’m very much looking forward to going through the exercise of revamping our application and all of the supporting information that’s needed for a successful certification. An internal audit such as this one, driven by an organization with international roots and a vast amount of combined experience presents an incredibly beneficial opportunity to introspect. And through introspection, we’ll better our repository and the services it provides for our colleagues across the entire UC system.

Again – welcome to UC3’s 2026 New Year Series. The next post on Data Management Plans and DMP Tool should arrive next week!