04272017 Members Call

April 27 Conference Call

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• If dialing from Australia: 1 800 547 099
• If dialing from Singapore: 800 616 3166
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On the call:

• Martin Kalfatovic, Harvard/MCZ (Connie), AMNH (Tom), BHL Mx (Monica), Cornell (Michael), Harvard/Bot (Judy), MBG (Doug), MNHN Paris (Gildas), Kew (David), SIL (Nancy & Barbara), UIUC (Kelli)

Regrets:

• Graham Higley, Christine Giannoni, Neil Romanosky, BHL Australia, BHL Singapore, Library of Congress, USGS, NYBG

Agenda and Notes:

• Recent BHL EC Actions (Connie/Doug)
  • Membership Committee composition: currently Doug, Nancy, Tomoko, Wai Yin (Christine must step down for awhile but would like to return). EC will discuss on it's next call; if anyone is interested in joining, please be in touch with Doug.
  • Report on Vote on Affiliate status for Partners: 17 yes/0 no votes with 2 members suggesting that we reconsider our current membership tiers; one not voting. There was a bit of discussion about benefits of Membership/Affiliate status and there will be a further review of all of this.
• BHL Secretariat Update (Martin)
  • Report on Earth Optimism Day participation. Very successful event with over 250 visitors over the course of the three days. We had a number of volunteers to staff the booth from the Smithsonian Libraries (supplemented by MRK, Carolyn, and Grace). Tomoko Steen and her BHL intern, Amy Zhang also volunteered at the booth. MRK and Carolyn discussed the success of the booth in context of previous booths that BHL has hosted (e.g. at ALA) and feel that there is a much higher impact of discipline based booths than general library type exhibition areas. Because of the time commitments to both creating and staffing booths and to extend the opportunity to participate more widely across the BHL community, the Secretariat proposes that a template be developed for BHL exhibition booths that could be used at other venues (such as Ecological Society of America). See the blog post with photos on the BHL blog.
  • Letter of Support for the EU DiSSCo proposal. As approved by the BHL EC, BHL has provided a letter of support (early April) for the multi-year BioDiv infrastructure proposal (Distributed System of Scientific Collections, aka DiSSCo)
  • Prospectus Feedback. Members are encouraged to send feedback on the Prospectus ASAP to Martin or Carolyn. BHL EC will review and provide a charge to the
  • BHL Australia Visit. Carolyn (and Smithsonian Libraries staff) met with Wendy Pryor (Head of Digital and Emerging Technology at Museums Victoria). Wendy is Ely Wallis' supervisor at MV. Carolyn shared with her various BHL activities including the NDSR work. She was also pleased with the recognition of MV volunteers at the BHL Annual Meeting.She was supportive of BHL Australia and MV participation.
  • NDSR Symposium. Carolyn Sheffield is attending the NDSR symposium (27-28 April); all BHL NDSR residents are attending. You might also want to visit the NDSR blog.
• Technical Update | Notes from All Calls Are Online (Martin)
  1. DPLA harvest of BHL data is now updated; new harvest will occur every two months (next one in June)
  2. There will be a BHL Technical meeting in September in St. Louis, in conjunction with an NDSR meeting
  3. Full text servers are on back order due to new (larger. 1.9tb) SSD configuration replacing the older (smaller, 1.6tb) configuration; summary of full text discussions from October available here; planning document here
  4. OCLC has ceased harvesting BHL content for their "Knowledge Base"; this was at our request because of the poor formatting of the data; when BHL has completed the KBART mapping, we can reopen the discussion for getting BHL content into the OCLC Knowledge Base
  5. No word yet from BibAlex on work package proposal
  6. Planning for migration of the BHL blog from Blogger to a Smithsonian hosted version of WordPress is underway; Grace had selected a WordPress theme to use at the core; she and Joel are working on a migration plan; target is to launch by no later than October; in related news, the Tech Team has endorsed the concept of a "Developer Blog" to post more hardcore technical details (similar to other developer sites like Google, Apple, HathiTrust, etc.); this would have infrequent posts and be more in the lines of "news you can use"; appropriate platform TBD
  7. The RIS replacements for EndNote have been implemented and are live. The bibliography pages now have a RIS tab that is populated with RIS data; those tabs include the option to download the RIS data. In addition, there are two new API methods (GetTitleRIS and GetPartRIS). A process to create RIS exports is also in place. The first RIS exports will be created on April 1 (see example); thanks to Mike for expediting this
  8. Macaw problems have been resolved; combination of "unlikely events"; scratch space filling up (Joel is requesting additional space as well as assigning quotas to users)
  9. Additionally, Joel Richard and staff are working on Macaw enhancements.
  10. Susan Lynch is organizing a discussion with Mike and Trish on batch article definition that is also of interest for BHL Australia
  11. Joel is reopening the ticket to implement HTTPS on the BHL site; this was delayed during the initial launch at Smithsonian (and hadn't been implement at MBG); I've asked Joel to expedite this ASAP; SSL certificate is in place, need to work around some firewall issues that; playing with HTTPS/Firewall settings will cause disruptions to BHL access for 10-20 minutes at a time; will look to have solutions in place and then give a warning of when the outages will happen
  12. NHM loading NAS/RAID with BHL Europe data; 75% full as of 28 March; Chris Sleep (NHM) noted that the Imperial College IT work is being moved back so the formerly had cut off date of "end of March" is looser and there are "a couple extra months" to move the data
• 2018 Annual Meeting Update (Connie)
  • Selection of the date in March: March 12-16
  • Carolyn had a briefing call with Richard Hulser, Susan Eubanks, and Abigail (Singapore) to help give the LA hosts an idea of the planning involved for a BHL annual meeting; the BHL EC will discuss the outlines of what the meeting form will be at a call on 4 May
  • Gildas suggested that there be a space/time for participants to discuss wider issues related to their own institutions (outside the library or even within the wider library community). Other participants seconded this idea; perhaps a "birds of a feather" type of session that would occur during social times. Gildas suggested that a small group of participants might draw up a list of discussion topics (library e.g. restructuring libraries) and lead discussions on that topic.
• New Grants Submitted or Received? (Martin)
  • CLIR Hidden Collections proposal for "Field Notes II" submitted earlier in April
  • MNHN (Paris). Was selected to receive a grant (amount TBD) for 5 years to explore digital archiving and archival materials. Another was interoperability between library and museum data.
• Recent/Upcoming Conferences/Meetings (everyone)
  • Report on the ICSTI, RDA and LD4L Meeting (Martin)
  • IFLA World Library and Information Congress August 19-25, 2017 (Jane Smith and Connie Rinaldo have a poster)
  • XIX International Botanical Congress, Shenzen, 23-29 July 2017 [BHL Symposium]
  • LIBER 2017 (Connie/Jane/Martin presenting a paper) July 5-7, 2017
  • International Open Repositories Conference, Brisbane, 26-30 June 2017 Ely Wallis presenting talk (with Connie Rinaldo and Jane Smith in abstentia) [DH Section]
  • 6th Global Botanic Gardens Conference, Geneva, 25-30 June 2017
  • ALA Annual Conference, Chicago, 22-27 June 2017
  • SPNHC 2017, Denver, 18-24 June 2017
  • Inaugural Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 5-6 June 2017 (Alicia/NDSR talk and poster; Martin talk at the GBIF session)
  • 9th International Conference on Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries, Limerick, 23-26 May 2017
  • BHL NDSR and Technical meeting (scheduled for 12-15 September in St. Louis)