August 29

August 29 -- BHL Exec Call

ON CALL: Martin, Nancy, William, Susan, Connie

Nancy gave report on her visit to Singapore and shared a link to the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research - new building to be named after donor Lee Kong Chien. http://rmbr.nus.edu.sg/ She met with Dr. Taylor at the Sinagpore Botanic Garden to request permission to digitize several journal titles and discuss the possibility of developing a S.E. Asian node for BHL. The National Archives are mostly responsible for the digitization and are scanning archives and type specimens with funding from the Mellon Foundation. Christine, the Librarian at the Garden is aware of BHL and she and other researchers use it. Taylor suggested the Singapore botanic garden was largest in S.E. Asia and would likely be the regional representative. There is also a Botanic garden in Indonesia. Nancy also met with Elaine from National Library of SIngapore. She is interested and willing to pursue the idea of creating a node and assemble a meeting with Botanic garden, National Library and staff from the Natural history museum. Nancy will provide sample MOU's for further discussion. Elaine will visit D.C. in November when this can be discussed further.
Martin reviewed all BHL documents including the revised membership document, MOU's and the BHL Bylaws. They are all out of sync and need revision. He will try to bring them all in line with one another and will present to this group for review and later the membership to vote on revisions to the bylaws.. He also suggested we need an operational manual and will begin to prepare one.
The group discussed a message from Jesse Ausabel that was sent to Carolyn Sheffield regarding the quarterly report she sent out. Nancy and Martin will draft a response regarding any misinterpretation or whatever misunderstanding may have taken place and will try to clarify our relationship with EOL. They will also request that all future communications go to then and not the BHL staff. We may also be collaborating with the NESCENT center at Duke along with EOL (Martin and Cindy Paar had met at Duke last April)
We also need to sort out all MOU's and related documents between various nodes. Many MOU's were signed at GLobal meeting but Africa signed several documents at the meeting in Pretoria -- not sure what was signed.
Martin and William are talking to representatives at CANABIO to discuss them joining BHL as Mexican node or as member of US/UK group.
BHL content is actively being downloaded from the IA to the Smithsonian and they purchased a 24 tb NAS. Several members of the technical advisory team will travel to Woods Hole in late September to download the cluster at WH to the Smithsonian.