05252017 Members Call

May 25 Conference Call

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Attending:

Regrets:

AGENDA and NOTES

• Secretariat Update (MRK)
  • Membership Committee composition: Still waiting to schedule EC will discussion on composition.
  • BHL Donations. April and May (to date) were a banner month for cash donations to BHL; we had 16 donations totaling US$855.00; donations ranged from US$10-300.
  • Kenya Presentation: US Embassy. As part of their attendance at AETFAT (see below), additional speaking engagements were arranged in Kenya to promote BHL. On 19 May, Carolyn Sheffield gave a presentation on BHL to 60 attendees at the American Reference Center at the US Embassy in Nairobi. There were invited guests from National Museums of Kenya, the Kenya Wildlife Service, Nature Kenya: The East African Natural History Society, and the National Commission for Science, Technology and Innovation (NACOSTI). In addition, Albertine worked with ARC Deputy Director Nashon Akello to publicize the program widely with the university community and faculty and students from both Kenyatta University and the Technical University of Kenya. Martin Kalfatovic gave a presentation unrelated to BHL. There will be a detailed BHL blog post on the session.
  • Kenya Presentation: Mpala Research Centre and Foundation. Under the auspices of Scott Miller, Deputy Under Secretary for Collections and Interdisciplinary Support and Vice-Chair of the Mpala Foundation, Martin R. Kalfatovic (Smithsonian Libraries Deputy Director) and Carolyn A. Sheffield (BHL Program Manager) spent three days at the Mpala Research Centre in Laikipia County, Kenya (about 237 km north of Nairobi) to learn more about the activities and research at Mpala and to explore partnerships around the Biodiversity Heritage Library and scholarly communications. Carolyn Sheffield presented on BHL and included a demo of key BHL feature. The session was attended by 20 people from the Mpala research community, local universities, and staff from nearby Martin Kalfatovic gave a presentation unrelated to BHL. There will be a detailed BHL blog post on the session.
• Technical Update | Notes from All Calls Are Online (Martin)
  • Enhanced Flickr Tagging. Flickr allows you to use "notes" to add tags to specific coordinates on an image. This feature allows users to draw boxes around individual specimens on a plate and add relevant tags to that box. EOL can use this to associate names with specific specimens and also break the image apart into individual species during ingest. With the current image-level machine tagging, there is no way to determine which taxonomic tag refers to which specimen on a multi-species page.This data is contained within the Flickr API, so it's easy for us to grab and use as well. The API also includes the coordinates that those notes are associated with, so we could theoretically in the future also use this data to associate tags with specific places on an image in BHL.
  • Full Text. Servers are being configured at the Smithsonian.
  • BHL Egypt Proposal. BHL Egypt continues to work on their work plan proposal and will get it to Martin soon.
  • KBART. Mike has begun work on on 1 or 2 Gemini issues related to KBART. Schedule remains on target.
  • Implementing BioStor-like article definition in BHL. Technical team is looking into implementing a BioStor-like article-ization feature within BHL and Macaw. Very preliminary stages. Mike has been in touch with Rod Page to discuss the codebase.
  • User generated PDF metadata. The Tech team continues to examine the best process for using user-generated PDF metadata. The impact of the availability of full-text search is a key consideration.
  • International Image Interoperability Format. BHL is beginning a very preliminary look at the IIIF image format for a future implementation in BHL. The NDSR project will follow up on contacts made by Martin with the IIIF project at Stanford.
• Topics from the Chair and Members (Connie/Jane)
  • Berlin. Jim Hanken from MCZ has been in touch with staff at MfN Berlin and will put them directly in contact with Connie to follow up for potential BHL partnership.
  • Spain. Connie has been in touch with the Royal Botanic Garden, Madrid about BHL partnership. It is under discussion at the Garden.
  • Montreal. Connie was in Montreal and met with staff at McGill University.
  • Expanding Access/Moving Wall Question (Barbara Ferry). Barbara Ferry (Smithsonian Libraries) raised this topic on the Members list. Barbara will speak briefly on the topic to get ideas flowing. The topic can be further covered after Members have an opportunity to think about it more on future calls or at the annual meeting.
    • Procedural questions:
      • Currently, the Smithsonian Libraries receives requests from Bianca to scan moving wall titles through Gemini. The actual titles can vary from year-to-year and new titles are added periodically throughout the year. We’ve asked Bianca to provide us with a predicable list of titles so that we can schedule our scanning for the year, and so that we can delay binding for titles that will eventually be scanned (yes, we are still binding some serials!). We also asked Bianca to assign us these titles perpetually -- until we tell her that we are unable to scan them. The question is would other libraries like to have a more predictable list of titles that then are assigned to that library going forward?
      • Currently, Smithsonian Libraries keeps all original items that are scanned, even if this amounts to just one issue in a journal run where we were filling in a gap. Is this something that other libraries do? Should we have an expectation for all libraries holding originals for future use/corrections?
    • Philosophical question:
      • Expanding Access has been so successful that I am wondering the long-term implications of such agreements on everyone’s workflow and how we would be handling communications with publishers if we decide to stop scanning/importing their titles sometime in the future. I know we are not under legal obligation to scan forever, but how we handle those decisions -- and the resulting communications -- may have implications for expectations as we add more EA titles in the future.

• Planning for 2018 Annual Meeting (MRK/Connie/Carolyn)
  • BHL EC plus Martin and Carolyn spoke with Richard Hulser and Susan Eubanks on 11 May 2017. The meeting will be held over three days, 14-16 March 2018 (Wed-Thur; 2 days at the Museum, 1 day at the Garden); there will be optional tours on Monday and Friday. There will not be a large scale "BHL Day" but rather small opportunities to have presentations by BHL users. There will also be much more time in the schedule for BHL partners to talk with each other on a range of topics; the goal is to have these discussions take place in both structured and unstructured formats. More details on the meeting will be available later in June after our LA colleagues finalize some additional logistics.

• Recent/Upcoming Conferences/Meetings (Connie/All)
  • AETFAT 2017. A full report of Martin and Carolyn's attendance will be available on the BHL blog.

• New Grants Submitted/Received (Connie)
  • See CLIR report from last Members call