TAI CHI Webinar on the Merritt Repository Service

There has been quite a bit of buzz around curation micro-services as a useful and effective way to handle digital preservation needs. The basic idea is this: rather than have a monolithic repository built on top of a database system, you have small, interoperable services built off the file system. The beauty of this struck me immediately.

By having small, interoperable services you can easily replace a service with a new one without harming the others. You can write new services and insert them without harming anything else.  And by relying on the filesystem instead of a database, should the worst happen you can simply walk the tree to rebuild your knowledge of what is there. I was an immediate fan boy of this new architecture coming from my former employer, the California Digital Library (CDL).

So that’s why I both blogged about it and also arranged to sponsor a free webinar on the digital curation system that uses these curation micro-services. Dubbed Merritt for the lake that lies near the CDL offices, Merritt is a system that provides permanent storage, persistent URLs, tools for long-term management, and an easy user interface for deposit and update.

The webinar is open to all but advanced registration is required. Register here* to attend this free webinar via WebEx on 18 November at 2 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (UTC 19:00).

This is the eighth webinar in the OCLC Research Technical Advances for Innovation in Cultural Heritage Institutions (TAI CHI) Webinar Series developed to highlight specific innovative applications, often locally developed, that libraries, museums and archives may find effective in their own environments, as well as to teach technical staff new technologies and skills. Recordings of these webinars are made available on the OCLC Research Web site and in iTunes.

While I have your attention, I want to thank Melissa Renspie, who is the person who makes this all happen. She handles all of the communication with the presenter(s), does an amazing job of hosting the event, and makes sure the recording is available afterward. Without her this webinar series would not exist.


*After you register, you will receive an e-mail message that contains instructions for logging on to WebEx, where you will view the meeting slides online through your Web browser (please note that WebEx recommends using Internet Explorer or Firefox, as Chrome and Safari are not supported). When you log in to the webinar, the presentation audio will be available through your computer headset or phone.

2 Comments on “TAI CHI Webinar on the Merritt Repository Service”

  1. Chris the point of our webinar series is to highlight new and emerging services and not to anoint one or another approach as “the one.” In any case, I hope you are able to attend the webinar.

  2. Roy, I’ve huge respect for the CDL folk, and find the curation micro-services idea interesting. But I’m finding it a little hard to accept. I think my concern is that I don’t see any decomposition of the high level concept of “curation” that then shows how it can be re-composed using the micro-services. Maybe I’ve missed it, but until then I’m inclined to think of these just as “micro-services”.

    I think it was the “pair-tree” service that first alarmed me. Interesting, but for heavens sake, why? Who said that curation requires a pseudo-randomised directory structure???

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