2011 Q2 Staff Report
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BHL Staff Reports
Q2 = April 1, 2011 - July 20, 2011
News
Darwin's Library launched http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/collection/darwinlibrary
SIL has launched a new scanning workflow where they are scanning via in-house processes and automatically uploading to IA Way to go! See their documentation for uploading to IA here:
http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/upload
Grant proposals submitted to NEH to develop a BHL image collection
Grant awarded for Global Names Architecture by NSF to involve CiteBank in a minor way; explanatory blurb by Chris Freeland:
"In other news, NSF finally approved funding to support the Global Names proposal I submitted along with Paddy Patterson of MBL, Rich Pyle of Bishop Museum, and Stan Blum of CalAcademy to build out the Global Names Architecture, including CiteBank. David Heskett, who has been doing work on CiteBank up to this point, will continue supporting CiteBank development as we expand to meet the Global Names requirements. I've attached the grant Project Summary in PDF form. As you can see CiteBank plays a very small role in the overall project, but it's great news for us. The fun starts in August (in earnest) on that project."
IFLA meeting coming up in Puerto Rico Becky and Bianca going to accept DeGruyter Saur award; Grace and Erin investigating publishing options for paper
Personnel Updates: MCZ welcomes Jacqueline (JJ) Ford, Phil Cryer has moved from MOBOT to working for Woods Hole & EOL but will continue to support BHL cluster
Life & Literature Speakers are coming together for the conference, see
http://www.lifeandliterature.org/
MODS exports of BHL records now available Please see
http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/data%20exports documenting information about the export of all BHL records in MODS format; Trish and Bianca to tweak this page with better instructions when time permits
Countersoft Bonus Countersoft is the company behind our Gemini Issue Tracking Software. As a result of Grace, Bianca, Erin, and Becky's paper about BHL's use of Gemini, Countersoft has awarded us a free subscription to Atlas, their Knowledge Management software
http://www.atlasanswer.com/. BHL's use of Atlas has yet to be explored. If you would like to help, please contact Bianca
Social Media
- BHL Flickr presence is growing! Check out our profile http://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary/. Gilbert and Bianca working to upload images from daily tweets, BHL Book of the Week blog posts, and other BHL books of interest. Gilbert working to embed key bibliographic metadata into the images using Adobe Bridge prior to upload. Inviting users to help us tag our images with taxonomic name machine tags so that they can be automatically harvested to EOL, such as will Aegotheles savesi http://www.eol.org/pages/1178114. Blog post about Flickr presence to come out shortly. If you know of any books with great images, please let us know.
Key Meetings: June 7-10, 2011 BHL-Europe Second Annual Review Meeting, Meise & Tervuren, Belgium - Touched on the following areas:
- Collection development Policy
- BHLE Best Practice Guide
- GRIB developments
- BHLE portal update - should soft launch prototype by end of August/September
- Developing virtual exhibition portal to help disseminate key sub-collections of content in BHL-US/E collection such as spices and expeditions
- see the minutes here: BHLE_AnnualReview2_minutes
BHL Global:
- BHL-Australia portal launched! bhl.ala.org.au -- Chris attending Int'l Botanical Congress meeting in Melbourne and visiting with BHL-AU colleagues to discuss further coordination between BHLUS and BHL-AU.
- Bianca is working with Michaela Hierschlager of BHLE to suggest edits to the BHLE Collection Development Policy which will be released as part of their Best Practices Guide
- GRIB update: to be launched in multiple phases; first phase launch will have the BHLE library catalog data integrated into the GRIB and occur in September; monographic deduper functionality is expected to be incorporated into the GRIB sometime in November, hopefully in time for the Life & Literature conference; a second phase launch will attempt to incorporate the Scanlist data; a third phase will attempt to incorporate BHLUS library catalog data as well as BHL-Australia library catalog data; 2nd and 3rd phases may happen in reverse order, but integration of the Scanlist is likely the higher priority; please stay tuned for further information from Boris Jacob (to visit DC on his way to the Life & Literature conference)
- Permissions coordination on a global scale: Bianca working with Melita Birthalmer to develop a "global permissions list" that will help coordinate permissions agreements across BHLUS, BHLE and future global partners; preliminary ideas include using Google forms to help facilitate this list
Projects:
- Trish & Bianca, w/ the help of Grace, Gilbert and Sue Graves (SIL) performed analysis of user generated PDFs and are working up mock-ups to suggest improvements to the "select pages to download" or create-your-own pdf option in the BHL portal; Trish and Bianca to present on the results of their work at the LITA National Forum conference in St. Louis in September
- BHL working with CrossRef to explore the assignment of DOIs to BHL...stuff...although not yet certain at what level the DOIs will be assigned; thoughts center around assigning DOIs at the title level, starting with monographs first; some questions remain regarding the treatment of different versions/copies of the same book - would each get its own DOI or would the DOI sit at the title level and all versions would simply point to this single DOI?
- TL2 project @ SIL chugging along, see details here TL-2 Taxonomic Literature 2nd Ed
Presentations/Papers
Please remember to update these pages with your work
Selection & Deduplication
- As of May 12, 2011 all non-BHL member monographs have been loaded into the monographic deduper
- NHM scanning workflow for monographs fully operational
- Scanning at NYBG and AMNH has been complicated by the fact that the Jersey City IA facility has moved to Princeton, NJ making it prohibitively expensive to ship books for scanning; AMNH will be sending content to SIL for scanning and NYBG welcome to do the same using the BHL FedEx account (for account name and password, please contact Bianca or Grace)
- Sadly, Harvard Botany has lost the majority of their scanning funding. Grace is redirecting all Harvard Botany Gemini issues to other members. SIL and MCZ are on deck to assist Harvard Botany in order to get unique titles from their collection scanned.
Scanlist
- A few minor bugs noticed in scanlist that Wolfgang is working to fix - need to check up on status
- As a reminder, there is a problem with the bids for content ingested between November 2009 and June 2010 - Mike is working to address this problem. Please double check the BHL portal before you send a new serial title for scanning. - need to check up on status
- Becky and Bianca received an output of all titles in the Scanlist for which there are no bids and found the list to be extremely unhelpful. You may try your luck with the file (split into 2 pts) if you wish bibs_nobids.zip
Gemini
BHL Portal Issues
- Image Server Changes & the Woods Hole Cluster Now that Phil is working now more closely with the BHL cluster in Woods Hole, the serving up of images to the BHL portal has been modified. The cluster in Woods Hole, holds a copy of all BHL content that is currently in IA. This means that MOBOT content is not yet in the cluster (b/c it is not yet in IA), but Mike L. and others are working to load MOBOT content into IA so that it too can be reflected on the cluster. The cluster is now able to serve images up to the BHL portal such that if IA is down or IA is receiving too many requests for the same image, the cluster can kick in and serve the image up instead. Stay tuned for more developments with the cluster as Phil continues in his new position.
Collections
- Collection Development Policy The BHL Collections Committee is in the process of approving the final draft of the public collection development policy that will be released on the public facing wiki very soon Collection Development Policy; internal collection development policy to be completed and released soon.
- UIUC is no longer scanning directly to the "biodiversity" collection in IA but we are still bringing in UIUC content via the ingest process. On a case by case basis, UIUC content is being added to the "biodiversity" collection upon prior approval, i.e. Betsy Kruger contacts Bianca about it first.
- Index Animalium project is still chugging along. Suzanne and co. have been working to organize the Index Animalium data they have in their SIL database and comparing bibliographic references found in the index with BHL books. Collections committee to provide some assistance once Suzanne is ready with her initial dataset.
- Ideas churning to provide documentation regarding various libraries in the BHL and their due diligence practices; some ideas involve re-working the BHL permissions page Permissions to include due diligence documentation
- William has been working with the Organization for Tropical Studies in Costa Rica to obtain lists of titles important to the region which should be digitized for BHL; Bianca working with this list to enter titles into Gemini, please stay tuned for "OTS title" assignements
- For more about the BHL Collections Committee Discussions, see collections committee discussion
Permissions
- New Acquisitions: TBD
- Bianca working with Trish to load already digitized content into CiteBank for which we have acquired permission to include in BHL, see the CiteBank content providers page for content that has been successfully loaded
Scan Requests
From April 1 to June 30
104 scan requests received
17 determined to be materials requiring "special handling", i.e. oversized, rare, etc.
68 requests are still open: 46 have been assigned or are in progress; 22 requests have not yet been processed and assigned, i.e. Bianca's backlog
36 requests have been resolved
Top Requesters:
BHL collection stats
Includes ingested content
FYI Cambridge University Library added to the BHL member institution drop-down menu on the RH side of the BHL homepage
New Titles added: 835
New Items added: 2,458
New Pages added: 910,118 | down 303,682 pages or a
25% decrease in scanning output from last Q
PDFs generated: 8,749 |
avg. of 96 per day (@ 13 weeks * 7 days = 91 days)
PDFs generated w/ metadata and saved to CiteBank: 3,674 |
avg. of 40 per day
Documentation & Communication
- public wiki page on Developer Tools and APIs has spawned into an additional page http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/data%20exports documenting information about the export of all BHL records in MODS format
- Grace working on search tutorial instructions for users
- BHL Cookbook has not died! Stay tuned for an update from Grace
- For the record, all CiteBank titles are now being handled through Redmine, the issue tracking system used by the BHL Techgroup at MOBOT
