3_21_2013StaffCallNotes
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Attending
Becky Morin
Grace Costantino
Marty Schlabach
Bianca Crowley
Jenna Nolt
Diana Duncan
Doug Holland
Matthew Bolin
Joe deVeer
Matt Person
Alison Harding
Daria Wingreen-Mason
Diana Shih
Don Wheeler
Randy Smith
David Iggulden
John Mignault
Jackie Chapman
Gilbert Borrego
Keri Thompson
Trish Rose-Sandler
Mike Lichtenberg
William Ulate
Notes:
- Introducing Jackie Chapman!
Newest member to Smithsonian Libraries team. Started as intern with Smithsonian Libraries in Summer 2012. Graduated from UNC Chapel Hill with MLS. Now working on BHL workflow and helping in Gemini.
New UI reactions/feedback
New UI launched on Monday, March 18.
Thoughts?
Don: It's blue.
Becky: It's slow.
Bianca: We've heard lots of comments about it being slow. Has been told to technical team.
Becky: Navigation is better, but it's truly terribly slow.
Bianca: William told us that they're trying to figure out what's going on with slowness, but we don't know lots of details. John/Joe any info?
John/Joe: No.
Bianca: Mike, what about the slowness?
Mike: It's because we're so popular and cool! Actually, we have about double the traffic as usual and thus it's causing slowness.
Becky: Slowness has been since it's been live.
Marty: Slowness on beta, but I figured it was just because it was beta.
Trish: Beta was definitely slow.
John: Was it slower on beta as compared to now?
Marty: No idea.
Bianca: Is there anything that can be done to speed things up?
Marty: Why are we having more traffic?
Mike: Lots of publicity, so more people.
Becky: If you land on the homepage, people are probably spending more time on site trying stuff out too.
Mike: Also on par to have more PDF downloads than ever before. So we probably just need to ride this out. If it goes on more than this week then we'll need to do something.
Marty: Having trouble when using Firefox to display a PDF. It's slow and it doesn't bring PDF down past first page. Firefox now has native PDF viewer and it's not handling some PDFs well. I've had to go in and have PDFs displayed using Acrobat reader or Acrobat Pro.
Matt Person: Firefox viewer is a poor product and makes it difficult.
Becky: My staff and scientists don't even try with Firefox.
Grace: Complaint about user using older IE browser.
Mike: I tested 8, 9 and 10 and no issues, so probably on his end unless I start hearing other things.
Grace: Can't zoom in on PDF viewer. Can we change that?
Mike: I would hesitate to change that unless we hear from other users that we need the change.
Bianca: Another issue: If you search for something in BHL with no title search results but only search results for scientific names, people think there are no search results because you have to change tabs to see the search results based on content type. The banner wasn't obvious enough to this user. Suggestions that we change this has been going around. It sounds like William is working on that, though.
Mike: There have been discussions about this with lots of users, so this may be a viable change. Not sure of the solution, but we need to do something to make search results clearer.
Jackie: Maybe we can change the text to tell people to look above for other search results.
Bianca: There's lots of suggestions we can pose. Our group needs to figure out who the right people are to try to work on a solution. Is BHL-AU still helping us with design tweaks? Is this TAG issue?
Mike: It's a design issue but AU's designer is no longer on project. Not sure where to go for design UX advice.
Bianca: Anyone have a design UX person on staff that could help?
Marty: We do but I can't volunteer them.
John: We could take a first stab at this in TAG. I have a couple ideas.
Bianca: TAG will deal with further tweaks. Submit further feedback to [[
http://biodiversitylibrary.org/contact/]]
Portal Editing queue in Gemini
Bianca: Grace and I used to perform all portal edits from issues we get in Gemini, but we don't have time for that anymore. We started a general portal edit queue in Gemini for anyone to come and assign the issue to themselves and deal with it.
Trish: The queue is getting backed up. I volunteered to be the portal editing wrangler to try to help move these issues through the queue. The types of edits are uploading title records, merging records, pagination, etc. I'm looking for volunteers comfortable doing this work that I can assign these issues to. I will try to do some of this work myself, but I don't have all of the tools I need to deal with all of them. I'd like to work with other people who are already doing this type of work to volunteer to help. Any volunteers?
Volunteers:
Diana Duncan
Alison Harding
Joe deVeer
Diana Shih
If you want to help later, email Trish.
Joe: Are you talking about importing records from OCLC? I'm familiar with creating records from our own catalog but if it's records we don't have I'm not sure how to do this.
Trish: JJ did a tutorial that explained how to do this with two options. Either OCLC or your own catalog.
Bianca: Also other issues like resequencing volumes or associating titles are in this portal edit queue.
Priority titles
"About a third of the 10K 2012 scanning funding has been spent so far. Ready to spend out the rest? What if you want to send a title for scanning but it hasn't been marked as a priority in Gemini? Feel free to nominate new titles for priority scanning.
There are still over 90 priority issues open in Gemini but if you know of other titles that would be important additions to the BHL collection, please send them for scanning under the current scanning fund. The only requirement is that you open a Gemini issue (read "open a Gemini ticket") and mark the issue as a priority.
To submit titles into the Gemini system, fill out the BHL feedback form: http://biodiversitylibrary.org/contact or send an email to gemini@biodiversitylibrary.org
Then log into Gemini: http://biodiversitylibrary.countersoft.net and assign the issue to yourself. You'll need to mark the issue as a priority by changing the <Priority> field status from "Trivial" to "Major." Need help understanding how to change this status in Gemini? Contact me: 202-633-2239 or crowleyb@si.edu<mailto:crowleyb@si.edu>.
For <Priority> "Major" issues in Gemini, send any volumes through the workflow spreadsheets (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ak0hDkSQMhfDdHRhTWVxaXFCbi1NRE51UkxUV0tSRmc&usp=sharing) as normal."
Bianca: On last collections call, Don had question about wanting to scan some titles with current scanning pool, but these titles weren't designated as priority so we couldn't send them with pan-BHL funds. How can we nominate new titles as priority? Answer is just go for it. We're privy to our collections, we know what's important and what's a priority or less of a priority. Please submit titles you think are relevant to this new scanning fund but document why these are priority titles in the Gemini issue.
Round Robin Q&A:
- How's your scanning workflow coming along under the new pan-BHL scanning pool?
- What's one thing BHL could do to make your life easier?
NYBG:
Don: Spreadsheet works very well and it's easy to use. It helps me keep organized and keep tabs on the money. We're cranking along. We've selected several volumes and up to over $800 in funding and 8,000 pages. We're just about ready to ship out the volumes. Our holdup is where the shipping money will come from. Easy to select from the Gemini queue.
Life Easier: Money and people are short. More staff and money would be good.
CAS:
Becky: CAS doing well. I have lots of Gemini requests sitting there, but I haven't been able to dig into the new scanning workflow because I've been out of the office. It's on the agenda for April. The worksheet looks simple and easy. Most of this stuff is fresh for me because I was late to the scanning game. Everything seems intuitive and easy for me.
Life Easier: Again, my problem is staff. I have to do everything for our BHL workflow, so it limits what we can do. Otherwise, everything is good. Bianca and Grace are always there when I need help. Just keeping being awesome! That will make my life easier.
Cornell:
Marty: Have not gone down scanning path, and we haven't scanned anything with IA yet.
Life Easier: Taking some of my other responsibilities away to give more time for BHL. In next couple of weeks we do hope to give some attention to the pan-BHL workflow. We have other scanning projects underway that will bring content to BHL.
MCZ:
Joe: We haven't used the spreadsheet yet. I'm putting a cart of things together based on Gemini requests, so between those and going into priority requests in Gemini I'm slowly putting a cart together. I've been waiting till I have a volume of stuff before I add to the spreadsheet. The process looks very intuitive, though.
Life Easier: It is just a matter of finding time to devote to BHL.
Bianca: I'm starting to think seriously about trying to get an intern program together.
Becky: If idea of sharing interns does happen, we have experience with pulling this off. If you want to talk about this at a later date, please talk to us.
Bianca will talk to CAS about this intern idea.
Field:
Diana: Doing scanning with money we got from the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois. How long will it take to get stuff from IA into BHL?
Bianca: My understanding is that MBG is harvesting on a weekly basis.
Mike: If it went into IA Wednesday last week, it probably didn't get pulled into BHL this week, but will next week.
Life Easier: Nothing.
MBG:
Doug: Not using pan-BHL funds because we don't scan with IA. We continue to scan in-house. We've had a little bit of problems with machines but now resolved. Still trying to balance Michelle having left and we can't replace her. She was doing quite a bit of portal editing. Randy has taken over some duties but he has other things to do as well.
Life Easier: We need more money - how about a 50 million dollar BHL endowment? :-)
Bianca: We have tried to put together a
project nomination form to get funding to scan finite projects about specific topics. If we have these things on file we can find ways to get general funding for these. If someone comes to us and says they are looking for a project to fund, we could present these plans to them and possibly get funding.
AMNH:
Diana: Not much going on. Still waiting on SC paperwork to start sending things out using pan-BHL funds.
Matthew: We're still continuing our internal QA and getting adjusted to new UI.
Life Easier: Nothing right now.
MBL:
Matt: Things going well. Also plotting along but not using scanning pool. We don't have much time to do scanning, though we do have non-BHL funds to use for scanning when we have the time to do some processing.
Life Easier: You already make my life easier. I love the presence BHL has in my life because it makes the rest of my work life easier knowing I'm part of this program.
NHM:
Alison: Sent two shipments using pan-BHL funds. I have a third ready to go and a fourth getting ready. Spreadsheet easy to use and works well. Our IA scanning person is up from 3 to 4 days a week so we can do more scanning.
Kew:
David: Going well, but I've lost most of my time to procurement so I haven't had time to send shipment yet, though the books are in the spreadsheet. Hope to send out shortly.
Life Easier: Nothing right now. Grateful for all the help from Bianca and Grace whenever needed.
SIL:
Keri: Things are great now that Jackie's here. Our scanning continues at pace. We don't have same money issue (SIL has own internal funds) but we're having trouble finding things to scan. We're looking at journal titles in scanlist that don't have any bids and eventually we'll pillage curators' offices to look for more content.
Bianca: I will put out a professional call to interns to see if we can get BHL interns. Will work with Becky on that. Send any additional ideas to me. Last comments?
Joe: One thing that will make life easier: Macaw installation.
Bianca: Yes, great point. That will make things easier.
Keri: Joel is currently working on that.
Grace and Bianca doing a webinar next week on how BHL collaborates through Gemini and how we edit through administrative dashboard.
http://connect.ala.org/node/201879
Keri going to RDAP in Baltimore with a poster.
http://www.asis.org/rdap/
Trish going to
Museums and the Web to do a demo on how BHL uses images and our Art of Life project and current Flickr process. Also going to V
isual Resources Association Conference and doing presentation on Art of Life.
