Promoting Visibility into Collections through Object Analysis

At CDL we work with librarians and archivists from across the ten University of California campuses. More specifically, as the team that maintains and augments our digital preservation repository, Merritt, we assist a variety of depositors with their digital preservation initiatives. Though most depositors are extensively familiar with the file formats and metadata of their content when it is ingested, preserving collections will, in a chronological sense, stretch beyond any one group of individuals. Therefore, a key challenge we face over time is to provide the means for current and future staff to thoroughly analyze the contents of their collections, at scale. This presentation will discuss a solution the Merritt team at CDL created to address the need to analyze the metadata, digital object structure and file types in the numerous collections being preserved in the repository. The solution leverages Amazon OpenSearch and its data visualization tools. We've found that OpenSearch has allowed us to create a rich map of relationships across elements of object data, and in turn lend depositors the necessary knowledge to make informed preservation decisions related to the metadata and structure of the objects in their collections and regarding file format sustainability.