August 19, 2008 BHL Executive Committee Notes

Biodiversity Heritage Library Executive Committee Conference Call August 19, 2008
On the call: Jane Smith, Bernard Scaife, and Nancy Chillingsworth from NHM (Graham away), Tom Garnett, Chris Freeland, Connie Rinaldo, (Cathy away)

1. OCLC Copyright project. Firstly, Tom' s reading of the DLIB article, http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july08/hirtle/07hirtle.html suggests that research about copyright post 1923 is likely too labor-intensive for most BHL libraries.

Should BHL participate as BHL? Harvard is participating and will be recording information in OCLC and probably the local OPAC and BHL copyright fields. NHM is recording copyright research in in-house system. If it is simple, NHM would be happy to supply a file with these data to OCLC. As a unit, BHL can't participate but BHL as a unit can support the initiative via individual member libraries. The Ernst Mayr Library (Harvard) is willing to explore options on how to get this information into the BHL portal. Wonderfetch may be an option but will need some revision and that may not be practical.

We must be vigilant about copyright compliance because the penalties are severe--even if we agree to take down disputed items. We could lose our servers, pay fines of $30,000. It is important that we develop a policy statement and that copyright decisions are more coordinated and explicit. We will charge a group (possible members: Tom, Connie, Diane, Nancy Chillingsworth...) with developing a document that rationalizes and documents the copyright clearance process of BHL, to be publicly posted.

2. Internet Archive status: IA has long range risk-management plans under development but there are no guarantees. Library of Congress (through 2010) and Boston sites are stable. There are various proposals for new space and funding for the NY site.

3. Collections white paper has been received and is under review. Will be a future agenda item.

4. Article-level Access through BHL Portal:

The MCZ publications editor (Jonathan Losos) and Museum Director (Jim Hanken) expressed immediate concern about the lack of article-level access to MCZ publications. They asked the Ernst Mayr Library to download all volumes and parse the volumes into individual article pdfs. Connie consulted with Chris to see if there is a manual solution that would be available on the portal rather than spending time to do this outside the portal. Chris noted that there is a model for capturing the articles but no interface to do this. Developing the interface is a big task.

Tom noted that IA has been looking for a test set of journals to parse into articles and then have the output manually verified by humans so that the algorithm can be improved. It has been a resource issue--it is labor intensive to complete the verification process and evaluate the results. Jim Hanken has offered the Ernst Mayr Library some extra support so it seems like this is a great match--Tom will ask IA to start with the MCZ journals and Connie will work with IA on the verification and evaluation and provide the resources.

5. Title matching issue: The 001 field is not unique in MARC so there is not a title id on every book. We need to get this right on the portal. Chris estimates that 90-95% of the records have the appropriate 001. We will need to be able to edit the aggregated record and will need an interface for this. Problems arise when libraries change records during the scanning process. We suggest that changes be made before scanning. Chris will bring this up in a "league of digitizers" conference call to get the opinions of the cataloguers. They can develop an appropriate workflow that can be agreed on and minimize this problem.


Next call August 26, 2008 at 11 AM EST, 10 AM CST, 4 PM GMT