Dear Merritt users,

 

A few exciting changes in Merritt to report.

 

We've successfully implemented the new Merritt Inventory--this is the metadata catalog within Merritt that keeps track of all descriptive and system information.[1] This new Inventory should be more responsive (ie faster) and also more robust (ie run better). Objects submitted to Merritt should show up very quickly after submission. Landing pages for collections and objects should come up more quickly also.

 

As a side benefit, eScholarship is able to harvest ETDs again. The ETD collections in eScholarship should be up-to-date.

 

Another change we've implemented--we've changed the URL in the browser bar to use the persistent form. This means that you can copy the URL from the browser for an object, version or a file, and get the persistent URL. This has been difficult in the past, because we displayed a different URL from what we recommended (!).

 

As part of this, we also implemented version "0" to always be the latest version. The persistent URL forms look like this:

 

http ://n2t.net/[ARK]	Go to the object landing page
https ://merritt.cdlib.org/m/[ARK]	Go to the object landing page
https ://merritt.cdlib.org/d/[ARK]	Download the object
https ://merritt.cdlib.org/m/[ARK]/[Version number]	Go to the version landing page
https ://merritt.cdlib.org/m/[ARK]/0	Go to the landing page of the latest version
https ://merritt.cdlib.org/d/[ARK]/[Version number]/[Filename]	Download the file of a particular version
https ://merritt.cdlib.org/d/[ARK]/0/[Filename]	Download the file from the latest version

 

Note that the ARK and Filenames in all of the examples above, except for first example (n2t.net), should be "URL encoded". But if you cut and paste from the browser, you'll get a properly encoded, persistent URL.

 

This required a tremendous amount of work--hats off to Stephen Abrams for creating the database schema, David Loy for developing and implementing the new Inventory, Mark Reyes for integrating Ingest with it, and Marisa Strong, Shirin Faenza and especially Erik Hetzner for switching the UI to work with it.

 

Email us at [log in to unmask] if you have any questions. Thanks,

 

Perry

 

[1] As consistent with the micro-services philosophy, all descriptive and system metadata are stored with the object in the storage system. The database provides optimization for users.

 

 

Perry Willett

Digital Preservation Services Manager

California Digital Library

415 20th St., 4th Floor

Oakland CA 94612-2901

Ph: 510-987-0078

Fax: 510-893-5212

Email: [log in to unmask]