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Merritt

At the core of our digital preservation efforts is an institutional commitment that transcends mere technology. We are not just about storing data; we are about preserving the essence and integrity of digital scholarship.

digital preservation repository

Digital preservation is a combination of actors, institutional policies, procedures and technologies that are all geared to ensure access to digitized and born digital content over the course of time, regardless of change in any one of these elements. In the context of digital preservation, the notion of providing access refers to ensuring the continuity of content usability, authenticity and integrity.

CDL offers consultation and guidance on ways to acquire or create such digital content in a manner that is most amenable to the highest level of future preservation service. As collections are established and deposits made into the Merritt digital preservation repository, the Merritt team collaborates with depositors through review of content types and metadata that comprise digital objects. In this vein, Merritt provides for automated classification of file types on ingest, the results of which are made available through repository reporting tools for evaluation at any time.

The design, implementation, and operation of Merritt are consistent with the community-accepted standard ISO 14721 Open Archive Information System (OAIS) reference model. The primary preservation strategy the Merritt repository employs is bit-level preservation. Preservation at the bit level is purposed to safeguard the bits of each file stored in the repository – bits being the series of 1s and 0s that encode the meaning of the digital materials they form. Success in bit-level preservation sees each bit of every file remain unchanged, or “fixed” over time.

To fortify its strategy, Merritt actively manages three copies of all files and digital objects in the system through use of external storage providers for primary and replication storage. The content of all collections in Merritt benefits from three object copies, maintained across three different cloud storage providers distributed across two geographic regions (US West Coast, and US East Coast) with differing disaster threats in order to mitigate risk.

Content in Merritt is organized into collections. A collection is composed of one or more digital objects, each object containing a series of digital files. Through object versioning, Merritt maintains a complete change history of managed content as it may evolve over time. All files are routinely fixity-checked through continual verification of cryptographic message digests of all content replicas to detect and correct any bit-level damage. Fixity checking cycles are completed across the entire corpus within a period of 90 days or less. Errors with ingest, replication, inventory, or storage operations are reported through automated system consistency checks which run on a daily basis.

Depositors may choose to review their collections at a granular level through Merritt’s Object Analysis functionality. Analysis results provide insights into object structure, metadata classification and file type classification. Furthermore, the process may be customized for individual depositor libraries and departments. Such analysis is key to active preservation practices, a core part of digital preservation promoted by the larger community.