April 26th ECSC Conference Call

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Dial in number: 1-877-860-3058
Passcode: 961479

Proposed Agenda:

• Financial/Budget Update (Martin)
  • Dues have been received from 9 members
  • EOL has submitted a $1M Sloan proposal; at the instruction of the EOL Executive Committee, funds will go to BIG and SPG. EOL expects an extension of the MacArthur funds and the EOL Secretariat is recommending all awards stay in place. BHL EOL Exec Committee members (Nancy and Graham) should work to make sure that this plan is put into effect.
  • Lounsbery Foundation has approved extension of the award for Life and Literature through November 2012. Funds can be used for meetings, outreach and related activiies
  • JRS Foundation will fund BHL Africa Organizational meeting (June 14-15, 2012, Cape Town)
  • Sloan Foundation has asked BHL to wait for the October board meeting to submit our image grant
• Intellectual Property Issues
  • CC0 license for BHL Metadata
    The BHL EC recommends that BHL apply a CC0 license to all BHL metadata. This will make the access to the metadata more clear for third party users (e.g. Summon, DPLA, etc.). This is in line with similar declarations (pace the recent Harvard announcement)
  • Trademark of BHL Logo
    At the BHL SC meeting, trademarking the BHL logo was discussed. BHL can register this only through a legal entity. The BHL EC recommends that the Smithsonian Libraries register the logo for BHL with the understanding that if BHL were to ever become a legal entity, rights would revert to BHL.
  • Flickr Image permissions change.
    FROM: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike -- CC BY-NC-SA -- This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.
    TO: Attribution-ShareAlike -- CC BY-SA -- This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to “copyleft” free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.
• Technical Update (Chris)
• Global Updates (Chris/Martin)
  • SIL Hosted BHL SciELO and MOBOT staff for a "BHL Bootcamp"
  • BHL Europe meetings (June 4-6, 2012)
  • BHL Africa Organizational Meeting (funding secured from the JRS Foundation)
• Upcoming and Ongoing Conferences/Meetings (everyone)
  • BHL to share booth with EOL at ESA (Ecological Society of America) 2012 (Connie Rinaldo will staff for BHL)
  • Proposed BHL Staff / Technical meeting. The BHL EC endorsed the idea of a BHL Staff / Technical meeting (funding with the Lounsbery money) to take place in the fall 2012. Susan Fraser has offered to host the meeting at NYBG. Details to follow. A planning group will be formed from the BHL staff group.
  • DPLA West Plenary and Workstream meetings. Martin, Chris and Nancy are in San Francisco for the DPLA Plenary (Friday) and Workstreams meeting (Thursday)
  • Martin and Chris, while on DPLA travel, met with:
    • George Oates (formerly Flickr)
    • Simon Sherrin (BHL Au, passing through SF)
    • Moore Foundation (Chris Mentzel)
    • Wikimedia (Erik Moeller)
    • Apple (Jill Vermillion)
    • Internet Archive (Robert Miller)
• BHL101 Recap.
  After several meetings with new BHL regional and global partners, staff feel the need to develop a set of “BHL 101” resources to which potential partners can be directed for answers to typical workflow, technical, collections, and governance questions. For example:
  "How can my institution contribute scanned articles to the BHL?"
  "Does my institution need to work with the Internet Archive?"
  Staff are aware that a subcommittee of the Steering Committee is working on a document outlining criteria for potential BHL partners and identifying possible candidates. "Team BHL 101" would like to take part in the conversations to develop this document, as the criteria for potential partners will inform the BHL 101 resources and vice versa. The BHL 101 team would appreciate feedback on the resource set as well as recommendations for due dates.
  BHL 101 team members: Bianca Crowley, William Ulate and Trish Rose-Sandler, with Grace Costantino, Gilbert Borrego, and Mike Lichtenberg consulting where necessary.
• Round Robin / Other updates (All)

Notes:

Minutes: On the call: Martin Kalfatovic, Grace Costantino, Nancy Gwinn, Jane Smith, Jean Farrington, Connie Rinaldo, Doug Holland, Judy Warnement, Susan Fraser
Martin reported that dues have been received from 9 members. He will follow-up with Tom Baione at AMNH about level of membership. USGS is still in discussion about when they will join.
EOL has submitted a 1 million dollar proposal to Sloan Foundation to support the species pages and the bioinformatics group. No funding for BHL in that proposal but Erick Mata will guarantee that all left-over funding from original sub-awards will stay with the recipients. --the current BHL subaward is @ MOBOT. Nancy and Graham should pay attention that there are no last minute fund switching. Nancy reported that she met with Jesse Ausubel who confirmed that Sloan will no longer fund BHL scanning but we may approach them from another direction. We will have to be creative about this. Josh Greenberg suggests we submit a proposal in September for review at the October Sloan meeting..\
Lounsbery allowed us to keep the leftover funding from the LIfe and Lit conference --to be used for meetings and outreach. This funding along with funding from the JRS foundation will support BHL attendance at the Cape Town, S.A. meeting. Since the funding came through the Field Museum, Christine will serve as P.I. on grant and will attend the meeting.
The group briefly discussed the CCO license and since there we no objections, we will move forward with the application to apply CC0 license
to all BHL metadata. Harvard recently announce they would release all their metadata- the announcement got lots of publicity.
The group discussed registering the BHL trademark through the Smithsonian (as the legal entity)The BHL EC recommends that the Smithsonian Libraries register the logo for BHL with the understanding that if BHL were to ever become a legal entity, rights would revert to BHL. There were no objections to this suggestion so Martin will proceed with this.
The group discussed the Flickr Image permissions change, from Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike -- CC BY-NC-SA -- to Attribution-ShareAlike -- CC BY-SA. This change may be more in keeping with the Europeana guidelines and other existing rights but several members of the group objected to the change. It was agreed that the images are "contextualized" in the BHL proper which provides a "thoughtful barrier" and therefore differentiates them from how they appear in Flickr. Although there was agreement that we have an open access policy and that a goal of the NEH grant would be to make illustrations more easily accessible, the group agreed that this topic needs more consideration so we can figure out the down side of commercial use, and provide a clear policy that is not ambiguous with our open access policy
A sub-group was formed to consider the issues - Jane, Connie, Doug and Martin
Martin reported that the new home page had been released.
Global updates-- There was a good meeting with the BHL SciElo team at the Smithsonian last week. Grillo Dias is the new manager of BHL SciElo and they have successfully separated their activities from the medical component are are not officially called BHL SciElo. BHL Brazil has 5 scanning operations and they are using MACAW. In addition there are 2 IA scribe stations in Rio de Janero so we should be seeing Brazilian content in the BHL very soon.
The BHL Europe meeting is scheduled for June 4-6. This is the wrap of this phase of the project and will include a public symposium. Nancy asked if William had a chance to present our draft bylaws an principals documents to the BHL Europe group. Martin will follow up on this.
The agenda is being built for the meeting in Africa in June. Martin, Grace, Nancy Chris F. and Christine will make up the U.S. delegation.
BHL will share a booth with EOL at the Ecological Society of America conference. Connie will staff the booth.
Connie and Trish Sandler wrote a paper turned poster session for the JCDL.
A tech staff group meeting will likely take place at NYBG in the Fall. Martin will ask Bianca to get volunteers to build the agenda.
Martin and Chris are at the DPLA meeting in San Francisco and have met with several associates including representatives from Moore foundation, Wikimedia, Apple, and IA. They are chairs of the tech session and BHL data was passed through the DPLA as test data. In discussions with Chris Mentzel from Wikimeida ist as discussed how to get our content placed strategically using Wikimedia guidelines. Suggested to establish a BHL project page to outline guidelines. Jill Vermillion from Apple and the iTunes U rep for cultural heritage collections encourged the creation of course development and repackaging content to create other products.
Robert Miller reported on some staffing changes at various IA scanning facilities and Martin will provide the new contact information to the relevant parties
Grace reported that she is working with a subgroup to develop a set of “BHL 101” resources to which potential partners can be directed for answers to typical workflow, technical, collections, and governance questions.
A subcommittee of the Steering Committee is working on a document outlining criteria for potential BHL partners and identifying possible candidates--that group includes Connie, Doug and Judy who will make recommendations regarding a nominal fee structure for potential partners. A larger group including Martin, Chris, Connie, Susan and Jane will outline criteria for potential BHL partners and identifying possible candidates. As it is we have several institutions interested in joining -- Library of Congress, National Agricultural Library, Los Angeles Natural History Museum and the California Digital Library
Jean Farrington announced that she would no longer be calling in as a representative of the California Academy of Sciences. She announced that Becky Morin had been named Head Librarian and she will represent the Academy in the future.

Addendum: For the record the BHL membership subcommittee (Connie, Doug, Judy) was formed at the BHL annual Exec meeting to create report listing potential IC candidates, criteria for IC membership, and statement about possibility of IC fee. Document will be for discussion by SC. Not to be confused with the Strategic Plan Group to revise strategic plan (group members Martin, Chris, Connie, Susan, Jane) which are listed in these minutes as being part of the larger membership group.