April 1, 2008 BHL Executive Committee Notes

Executive Committee Conference call April 1, 2008

Donat Agosti and Terry Catapano are working with NLM to develop
extensions to the NLM DTD : one extending the Journal Publishing DTD for
new or recent publications, and one extending the Archiving DTD for
existing and (especially) historical literature.


AAAS in Chicago in 2009: 3 slots for EOL, at least one for BHL. We
will participate--who will go is not specified. British AAAS should
also be on our agenda.

Wiley-Blackwell is very interested in playing an active part in the
BHL Europe bid. Interested in providing OCR content and metadata for
loading on the BHL Portal and Taxonomic Intelligence can searach it.
Graham will connect Chris with technical contact. Can announce that
we are in active discussions with W-B regarding getting their metadata and OCR
to use taxonomic intelligence. To get fulltext, will pay unless very
poor countries.

Names model is confusing--the names that we harvest in BHL should go into Namebank and then over to EOL. Names should always remain in a neutral place (Namebank). Why is Namebank more or less neutral than EOL? Because Namebank is not an objective classification, it is just a bucket for names and is therefore neutral (the name was printed in a publication or in an authority file like ITIS). There is also Classification Bank that keeps different classifications separately. Names architecture is of great interest in European biodiversity community. Names architecture meeting at Woods Hole on April 22.

Chris--QA: Robert Miller talked to Chris and said 633 items have been
pushed through backlog. Need to wait until QA done by IA so that
there will be no changes to the metadata. Entomological News
(Smithsonian) --need some hand editing. The BHL Admin site is
available so that designated users can go in and clean up metadata.
Martin has seen it. Who should use this? This would make BHL the
database of record--disjunct between what is in IA and BHL. Do we
need to provide a MARC XML record for cleaned up information? The
electronic record becomes a separate record. Long term, IA may not
be the primary data source. Thus BHL cleaned up metadata may be the
data of record. Once everyone moves to Wonderfetch and is pushing in
clean information, it will help. Editing capability is very
encouraging--administrative issues need to be ironed out. Bring it
up with the "staff in the trenches" group. When should it be brought
to the group? Not quite ready yet. As Chris travels in the next few
weeks, he will show the appropriate staff how this works and maybe we
can open it up in a month or so. What about adding more detailed
information (article level data)? More discussion later.

Chris working on Moore pre-proposal for jpeg 2000 source decoder and
server. Current state is mostly commercial, want money to make this
better. Smithsonian is taking the lead.

Martin and Chris talked to Bryan Heidorn about evaluating name finding, OCR etc. Bryan has a student
(Chin Wang) interested in project so with some funding for 8 weeks we can have some work done.

BHL Europe and Henning Scholz--econtent plus. Robert Miller is
working on same submission with Hans Walther--but for scanning.

Cathy and Tom have a conference call with Robert Miller tomorrow.
Will talk about QA, foldouts among other things.


Next call April 24 at 11 AM EST, 10 AM CST, 4 PM GMT