April 29, 2008 BHL Executive Committee Notes

BHL Executive Conference Call minutes April 29, 2008

Marie Studer connected Tom with a Kenyan scientist who is excited about BHL because of the lack of library infrastructure there. Would be a good tester for BHL.

Graham had a visit from Henning Scholz to work on the BHL Europe bid. The original document has been completely reworked. The document is shorter and the IT component has been collapsed into one unit. Paul Richards in London has agreed to take on the IT component. Henning and Graham will be writing the proposal over the next 6 weeks. There are 26 partners from 13 European Union countries--it will be a 4-5 million Euro bid. We will probably see a draft next week. Tom would like to see the management of this effort have a designated, official rep from BHL--Tom and Chris (as well as Graham). Will include another Petabox as part of the bid. Is it clear that this will be the storage of choice? We will use language that allows us to have some flexibility in technical solutions. Needs to be a strong connection with the European Digital Library. There may be a face to face meeting of key players in BHL and BHL-Europe next winter or spring.

Graham also noted that he is getting positive feedback from Wellcome. Daniel Glazer is interested in using the tree of life EOL tool. Patrick Leary did a demo of a taxonomic tool that navigates a taxonomic tree and Graham asks that Cathy find out who Graham should talk to because Wellcome is interested in spending some money to develop this. Wellcome is interested in supporting the BHL/EOL.

Chris had a call with Amit Kapoor/TOPAZ/PLOS about the Fedora/Moore proposal and about checking how BHL might work in a PLOS/TOPAZ
environment. Need to evaluate the scalability of this solution.
June 2/3 should be meeting.

Linda Frueh and Chris had a productive phone call. She will be talking to Brewster about what is needed to do a tractable project around document analysis with Xia Non Lu. BHL is open to funding this. Chris will be meeting with Linda in person on May 8. The Smithsonian has spent some money on this already.

Chris and Tom had a discussion with Lee Giles and James Wong from Penn State as to how to structure the Moore preproposal. Their expertise will help what gets done serve the broadest possible community. Proposing a meeting in early June about the same time as the TOPAZ meeting with Lee, James and Jim Omura (Moore). The BHL will be the use case without BHL having to manage this big computer science project.

Graham has offered Frank Bisby some travel money from BHL-Europe to attend meetings. Cathy has also talked to Frank Bisby about Catalogue of Life. MBL/WHOI Library is still running ubio and improving it. Taxonomic intelligence services that we use are derived from MBL/WHOI.

Bishop Museum is interested in having BHL host their publications. They have scanned some but not sure if we should re-scan.

Tom notes that Charles Crumley at UCal Press is interested in EOL and BHL. Has offered us some older publications to host at BHL. He knows the academic/scientific publishing world and we might be able to utilize his skills and knowledge.

Tom--don't forget to contact Allen Press. Cathy will send name/email.

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