BHL Africa Launch and Workshop Meeting Notes
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Participants
1. Ashah Owano
Resource Centre Manager
National Museums of Kenya
aowano@museums.or.ke
2. Ms. Loi Namugenyi
Science and Technology Information Services
Uganda National Council for Science and Technology
Uganda
l.namugenyi@uncst.go.ug,or
namugenyiloi@yahoo.com
3. Esther Obachi
Librarian
University of Nairobi
Kenya
ekobachi@yahoo.com
4. Eva Mutongole Wamala
Librarian
National Environment Management Authority
Uganda
emutongole@nemaug.org
5. Grace Emmanuel Peter Msoffe
Librarian
Sokoine National Agricultural University
Tanzania
grace.emmanuel@yahoo.co.uk
gracemakenga@gmail.com
6. Chipo Msengezi
ITOCA
Centurion
South Africa
chipo@itoca.org
7. Jackson Muhirwe
IT Officer
Lake Victoria Basin Commission
East African Community
muhirwe@lvbcom.org
jmuhirwe@gmail.com
skype: jmuhirwe
twitter: @muhirwe
8. Lawrence Monda
ICT Manager
National Museums of Kenya
lmonda@museums.or.ke
9. Preetika Bhanderi
Project Assistant
African Conservation Centre
KAREN
Nairobi, Kenya
preetika.bhanderi@acc.or.ke
10. Patience Agabirwe
Library Assistant
Kyambogo University, Uganda
agabirwe@yahoo.com
11. Patrick Omondi
Senior Assistant Director &Head- Species Conservation & Management
Kenya Wildlife Service
Nairobi
Kenya
pomondi@kws.go.ke
12. Peace Nagawa
EPRC
Economic Research Policy
Uganda
nagawa@eprc.or.ug
13. Anthony M. Wasike
Chief-Librarian
Kenya Wildlife Service
Nairobi
Kenya
wasike@kws.go.ke
14. Ria Groenewald
Digitization Coordinator, Library Services, University of Pretoria
Ria.Groenewald@up.ac.za
Skype: riagroenies
15. Sally Schramm
Librarian
South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity
Grahamstown
s.schramm@saiab.ac.za
16. Anne-Lise Fourie
Mary Gunn Library
Pretoria
SANBI
17. Ndileka Jaxa
Harry Molteno Library
Kirstenbosch
SANBI
18. Nancy E. Gwinn
BHL Chair and Global BHL Secretary
Smithsonian Libraries, Washington D.C., USA
GwinnN@si.edu
19. William Ulate R.
Global BHL Technical Director
Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, Missouri, USA
william.ulate@mobot.org
20. Grace Costantino
BHL Program Manager
Smithsonian Libraries, Washington D.C., USA
ConstantinoG@si.edu
21. Bianca Crowley
Collections Coordinator
Smithsonian Libraries, Washington D.C., USA
crowleyb@si.edu
22. Doug Holland
Library Director
Peter H Raven Library
Missouri Botanical Garden
St. Louis, Missouri
USA
doug.holland@mobot.org
23. Constance Rinaldo
Librarian of the Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University
Biodiversity Heritage Library, Vice Chair
crinaldo@oeb.harvard.edu
skype: connierinaldo
twitter @coniferr
24. Innocent Akampurira
UGABIF Node Manager,
Uganda National Council for Science and Technology
Uganda
akampurira@gmail.com
i.akampurira@uncst.go.ug
25. Alex Asase
University of Ghana
Ghana
alexasase@gmail.com
aasase@ug.edu.gh
26. Pierre Radji
Node Manager GBIF,
Togo Université de Lomé,
Togo
pradji@hotmail.com
27. Tushabe Herbert
National Biodiversity Data Bank (GBIF), Uganda
htushabe@muienr.mak.ac.ug
htushabe@hotmail.com
28. Hulda Gideon
Node Manager – TanBif,
Tanzania
hgideon@costech.or.tz
hgideon@hotmail.com
hgideon@tanbif.or.tz
29. Eddah Wasike
International Center of Insect Physiology & Ecology ICIPE
Nairobi, Kenya
Information Specialist
ewasike@icipe.org;
wasike.eddah38@gmail.com
Day One: April 15, 2013
Pretoria, South Africa
MOUs, Responsibilities, and Expected Outcomes of the Workshop
Summary
- Each region decides who their regional SC representatives will be. There are two for each region.
- Each region must decide what content they will provide to BHL, and must follow the copyright policies of their own countries.
- Everything that goes into BHL must go in as open access.
- Questions:
- How do we get training?
- How do we communicate the benefit of participating in BHL to our superiors and institutions? Why we should participate?
- How do we get the resources we need, and where will funding come from?
- How can we collaborate and pool our resources to share expertise and equipment.
- We need to organize a clear fundraising strategy.
- We need to figure out a structure for minimizing duplicated efforts.
- We need an information sharing protocol for BHL-Africa.
- We need a plan outlining what we are going to do with a timeline for when and how we will do it.
Detailed Notes
Anne-Lise needs signed MOUs from some people.
Anne-Lise: BHL-Africa divided under MOU into 3 regions: central, western, eastern. Eastern and southern are most represented. Western/Central mostly GBIF countries. Western/Central institutes needs to designate someone to be the actual library liason with BHL-Africa.
Eastern: Okay – no institutions to add.
Southern: still work to be done – need to add additional institutions.
Membership is institutional. Everyone signing MOU is member of BHL-Africa. Later in week we will vote for Steering Committee – two people from each region to form SC. Anne-Lise designated Lawrence Monda as IT person, but Jackson will assist.
When you sign the MOU, you represent your specific institute, not your country.
There can be multiple institutions per country as part of BHL-Africa.
One representative can be chosen by a few institutes within a country rather than having a representative for each institution if those institutions are small or do not wish to have a single representative from each.
Esther: Her boss signed MOU, not her. She is here representing her institution. How does that affect things?
Jackson: It is usual that the heads of institutions sign the MOUs, but we designates are the ones that actually work on BHL-Africa. You can add your name to MOU if desired.
BHL-Africa is not formed by countries, it is by institutes. The SC representatives from each region will work with each individual institute to answer questions and figure out how they should be represented.
William: Every member has a vote, so when several institutions sign the MOU, even if they send one representative, each institution signing the MOU has a vote unless they give the representative the proxy and that representative will vote for them all. The amount of institutions the representative is representing will be how many votes that representative will have.
Patrick: We have signed the MOU. In signing it we know that this is not a legally binding MOU – it can be changed over time. One of the issues we had was the open access policy and the Creative Commons license. There is a question mark next to the Creative Commons license, but we removed it. We want to know why it was there.
Also, how do we explain how BHL and BHL-Africa is good for each country and Africa in general, since it makes content free and some countries are worried that it will make their countries’ libraries irrelevant.
We need to explain the main benefits of BHL to developing countries, apart from the institution having greater global recognition. What else is there for us?
Anne-Lise: Regarding open access and Creative Commons, there are some things that are still within copyright, which you can’t digitize. Most of the things SANBI will digitize are rare book collections – old field books, things with no copyright. We do have stuff on BHL that we have licensed. Regarding what’s in it for institutions, for me personally, it means for SANBI that we get known globally more. It’s our chance to give the knowledge we have to the world. Not everything you digitize must be open access. Each institution must decide what we can and cannot put out. Africa is a continent of long distance learning. Many cannot travel to the countries where the books are. Having books available in BHL allows them to get the knowledge they need remotely.
Nancy: What the information means to the scientific world is one of the most important aspects. If people want to study about African wildlife, they will be able to get the information only held here as well as what is published elsewhere. If someone wants to study a particular species, they can get the literature related to that species all in one place. All of us are bound by copyright, and I’ll be talking about. In gBHL, it says that each one will abide by copyright laws in our own countries or regions. There are limits about what can be put in. We have licenses with over 250 titles to make the recent content available in BHL. We have arranged for that kind of information to be in BHL, but that’s not nearly all of the copyrighted information. The amount of junk in BHL will be up to you to avoid. As BHL-Africa you must determine what kinds of guidelines you want to place on what can be scanned.
Ria: There’s public domain content and in copyright content. Then you’ve also got grey material. We are going to work restrictively on the creative common licenses. In those licenses, you choose which one you are going to work according to.
Connie: Main advantage to you is you also have access to content from other libraries that you didn’t have before.
Nancy: Another advantage was how many new audiences we’re reaching because of BHL. The material is of broad interest to people beyond taxonomists, which were our original audience. You have to understand that whatever goes up will be under open access, creative commons, and anyone can use it. Don’t put up content that you don’t want this to apply to.
William: One of advantages is in the first paragraph of MOU. It talks about what BHL-Africa is. Cooperating with other institutions is actually a benefit you get – the workflow, expertise, knowledge management, and everyone has access to this information and can reuse it. It really creates a network of colleagues with extensive knowledge that each institution can use. For instance, BHL-US/UK new portal is based on BHL-Australia portal, so we worked together to use their website to improve ours. Having all this expertise means you’re not alone – you don’t have to start from scratch. We’re not saying that the way it has been done is the best. It can be improved. It’s good to learn from others and choose the best process that works for you.
Jean: You choose two representatives for the SC for each regional node. In the case of West Africa, we have French and English speaking countries. How do we deal with that?
Anne-Lise: You must vote and choose your representatives and decide amongst yourself how to handle it. Will the language barriers be a problem?
Jean: We might need to choose one representative from English speaking and one from French.
Anne-Lise: It’s for you to choose, but we must keep in mind that there are language barriers. Not same number of countries in each region. It is each region’s responsibility to get other institutions into the regional nodes.
William: You will be voting as a group, not as a region. This means that all the SC members come together and vote on a topic for the whole BHL-Africa project, not each region. Remember that we need a French and English speaking person in West Africa.
Patrick: Language is a challenge we have in Africa. It also has financial implications. It is something that needs to be talked about. When we talk about fundraising, we must talk about languages too.
Jean: Considering only English is a weakness today. Those from French-speaking countries are always complaining. So I want to pay more attention to French speaking countries as part of BHL-Africa.
Esther: Maybe we look for people that speak multiple languages, and these are SC representatives.
Jackson: There is also the data we’ll be looking at. Is there support searching for French terms? We must think about how we will display data in multiple languages.
William: You are the ones who decide how to vote and who to choose. I can tell you from gBHL, the meetings are done in English, even though not everyone speaks English as a native language. We do it in English because it’s usually the case that most people speak English. I’m not recommending that, but if you can find one language you can all speak, use that. When you go back to your regions, you will speak the language spoken there. The Brazilians are looking into getting our portal and translating it into Portuguese. The content will be in the language that it is published in. The content doesn’t get translated. The discussion is about translating the interface. We make our code available to global nodes to adapt if desired. If BHL-Africa has that need, they can take the code and translate into French.
Anne-Lise: The metadata and content will reflect the language published.
Eva: We have already have digitized material but people pay to access it. How will BH handle it?
Anne-Lise: It’s not open access so not in BHL.
Eva: How is BHL cooperating with CBD? CBD has been supporting many countries through CHM.
Anne-Lise: SANBI is a member of CBD, but not BHL.
Eva: Operations of BHL are not known in CBD. When I tried to take BHL to them, they didn’t know what it was.
Anne-Lise: Put your content in multiple places. Put it in CBD and BHL. The more places the content is in, the better the exposure.
Ria: If something is open access, it’s open free for all. Then you can just add a link for BHL or put the same content into multiple places.
Ashah: The way we handled it, we looked at the publications and put certain ones we’ve already made profit on for free, and then the more recent ones are maintained under a pay for access process.
Anne-Lise: It’s the same for us. Most of our institutional publications are free, and those will go into BHL. However, there will be some publications for which we will put a cutoff date on for what can be in BHL. Each institution must make the decision about what they’re putting into BHL. Big thing is that everything you put on BHL must be open access.
Anne-Lise: Intellectual property right is part of the MOU. It’s bound by your country’s or institution’s copyright laws. We did have the legal department of University of Pretoria look over MOU to look at legal issues.
Bianca: There is no global copyright law.
Anne-Lise: So you can scan and put up in BHL based on your countries’ copyright laws.
Nancy: There’s also a take down policy. If you put something up and people complain, we can take it down. Most err on the side of getting stuff up and then waiting to see if anyone cares.
Doug: Copyright boils down to risk management.
Connie: It’s useful to consult with lawyers at your own institutions about what you can scan. Harvard must be more careful because our legal department is more risk averse.
Bianca: I will also caution that access is one thing, but reuse is another. Tell your researchers how they can reuse the content based on the country you live in.
Patrick: If an institution is not aware of their countries’ copyright policy and put things in BHL they should not, it would be bad. So as members of BHL, we must each go back to our countries and find out what our nation’s copyright laws are.
Anne-Lise: Be guided by your librarians on copyright for your countries.
Eddah: Maybe we should look at our institutional mandates on open access.
Ria: Each institution should make their own decision on open access and creative commons.
Anne-Lise: You as librarians must guide your superiors on what you should put into BHL.
Eddah: MOU says that there are three levels of governance, but for BHL-Africa there are actually only two.
Anne-Lise: I will make the change. Also, remember, you cannot sign the MOU for BHL-Africa and then not do anything. If you sign the MOU, you must contribute. However, there are multiple ways to contribute. Even if you can’t provide content, advertising BHL is also part of participating in BHL. But you cannot become a member and not contribute anything to BHL.
Sally: It doesn’t have to be money that you contribute. It can be staff time.
Anne-Lise: Within BHL we’ve all got different talent and we can assist one another. It’s also about sharing your knowledge and giving to others in your region through expertise. We must also keep our list of publications that we can contribute to BHL up to date.
Anne-Lise: What do you want the outcomes of this meeting to be?
Peace: I really want to know what the benefits for my institution will be for being part of BHL-Africa.
Ria: I really want to figure out how we can make BHL-Africa work.
Preetika: We really need all of our biodiversity information in one place.
Esther: We need a timeline for what we are going to do, why, and by when.
Eddah: I just want us to collaborate and make content available.
Chipo: I want to know what we are all going to bring to the table and how we will coordinate this.
Anne-Lise: Being part of BHL-Africa also helps us build skills. It’s also important to bring young people in and train them.
Grace: I want to figure out what we are going to learn and how we are going to share the skills.
Baba: Will the international BHL offer some training for our staff, particularly for metadata? Will you organize some workshop? Training could also help us explain the benefit of BHL.
Esther: Training should be at the regional level.
Anne-Lise: Keep all of these things in mind when we talk about going forward.
Jean: Equipment needs is also very important.
Jackson: For institutions that have already signed MOUs, it would be good to have a letter from the future chair of BHL-Africa outlining project progress and explaining the benefits of BHL-Africa. These can be sent to the institution’s CEOs, but each person in BHL-Africa must also have buy-in with BHL and understand why we are doing it. Otherwise, we will not be able to excite others about the project.
Patience: My institution is cutting the budget and they have priorities for what they will pay for. How do I convince my boss that this project is worthwhile and worth being funded?
Esther: We must try to pool our resources together and look for partners that will help us accomplish what we want to accomplish. We should not dwell on explaining the benefit, but talk about how we are going to do what we want to do.
Anne-Lise: When it comes to digitization, it’s up to me as the librarian to either work it into my budget or find funding elsewhere. Each institution must figure out their own budget. Within the region, you can come together and apply to someone as region for funding for specific project.
Connie: Another benefit of being in a collaborative project is that each institution doesn’t have to do everything. You can share the load.
Peace: Problem we have is how to start digitizing. Will BHL-Africa give us something to start with and then we move forward. Will they give us training?
Anne-Lise: What you do for BHL is for the love of your library. You don’t get paid for it. If your institution wants to employ someone, that money must come from your institution. gBHL is not responsible for giving funding to BHL-Africa.
Lawrence: How will we come together to share resources to get BHL-Africa going?
Ashah: How will the Steering Committee work given the geographical distance?
Anne-Lise: We must use virtual communication. We will rarely get a chance to all get together in meeting in person unless we get funding. We must also look for opportunities where many of us will be in the same place to have meetings.
William: We can also serve as the literature component of lots of other biodiversity services, like GBIF or EOL, or even species names services. We provide the digitized literature and those projects link to BHL. When we talk collections in BHL, it’s just books; digitization of documents. Who has used BHL?
Most people in the room have actually already used BHL. There is a guide to the New BHL in the folder – it walks you through all of the services in BHL.
Anthony: I believe my institution will benefit greatly from BHL. We have some institutions that are a step ahead of others. We must all work together to help all of us move forward.
Patrick: When it comes to funding for BHL, I saw a part in a previous presentation that there is funding received from BHL members. I need to know what the cost implications of being part of BHL is. For instance, how much does it cost to send each person to a meeting? We should come up with a fundraising strategy that involves all of us. We also need to have ways to communicate as countries. Can we come up with practical ways of fundraising? A transparent way of fundraising that benefits key countries that subscribe to it. We must define what the ultimate output that will result from money raised through BHL-Africa fundraising is. We should think also about having national steering committees.
Baba: We should have a clear fundraising policy. We should also develop capacity within.
Jaona: It will be beneficial if everyone contributes to BHL. We should also come up with a good strategy to convince people to join BHL.
Jean: Being a part of open access is important. Most African countries are struggling with budgets, so it is important to think about fundraising strategies. Fundraising must be the first activity of BHL-Africa.
Sally: I have a concern about duplications of efforts. I’d like to see a structure to make sure that different institutions aren’t duplicating efforts. Not only what’s already in BHL, but also what others are planning to do. Also, I want to ask about the organizational structure? I think Swaziland can be added to the southern Africa region. How were the regions divvied up?
Anne-Lise: Originally we had four regions, but when MOU came back from Gracian, they had divided it into three regions.
Sally: What if some countries want to be part of regions they’re not technically part of?
Anne-Lise: This MOU isn’t set in stone. We can change it if needed. We’re not positive about how the regions were created and why certain countries were placed in certain regions. Gracian said three regions worked better strategically.
Jean: I would have preferred central and western Africa to be their own regions.
Anne-Lise: Originally we had eastern, central, southern, and western.
William: Why do you need to divide the regions further?
John: It’s more pragmatic. Western and central Africa are very different. It’s easier to solve problems by separate nodes, to discuss, and make decisions.
Anne-Lise: Might have been done because we don’t really have countries from central Africa.
Jackson: We can change it, make separate western and central, and then look for partners from central Africa.
Nancy: I can understand the concern about division, but if you haven’t had any representation from central, you can still start from where the current MOU is, not worry about this issue right now, and then later if you get more partners and you have more experience, you can look at the MOU again and decide what to change. But you’ve got a document, you can go with it for now, and get moving.
Jackson: There are issues of obstacles to sharing information in Africa. At least if we have our content digitized, even if there is turmoil in a country, and physical copies are destroyed, the knowledge is not gone. After this meeting, we must start something, and then perfect along the way. I also want to look at incentives. Since so much has been taken from Africa, what comes back to Africa? We must outline what incentives are there for Africa, to make sure that if they contribute this material, Africa gets something from it. We need an information sharing protocol for the BHL-Africa community. Concerning duplication of efforts, we need to look at systems that can be developed to look for information that is already available, like web crawlers, and put it in one place where others can easily find it. I also want to say thanks to SANBI for making sure that BHL-Africa is anchored to a single institution.
Survey
Survey sent to institutions in BHL-Africa to help us understand what we do and don’t have. Tomorrow we will look at the facilities each institutions have and what each institution’s capacity is.
Day Two: April 16, 2013
Introduction to BHL – William Ulate
bhl.pdf
BHL in the US/UK is the node that started the BHL project, but that doesn’t mean other nodes have to follow the same workflows. There are now seven BHL nodes, and each should figure out the approach and workflow that works best. However, many nodes have common problems. Thus we should try to pool our knowledge to solve problems as efficiently as possible.
BHL is about access to literature. It is particularly important to taxonomic researchers, but many other scientists use BHL. This includes history of science and art communities as well.
Now that we have many pages digitized, people want more of the rare titles. The BHL-Africa survey thus asked people to identify their rare, unique materials. New BHL partners should focus on these kinds of materials for scanning.
BHL now has over 40 million pages. To make it accessible in different ways, we add extensive metadata, extract species names, and try to add further value to this content. There is also a relationship between books and specimens, thus we should collaborate with these projects and provide digitized literature to them.
Advantage of BHL – It’s available everywhere, even when scientists are in the field.
Bhl.wikispaces.com/Testimonials – this webpage collates all the praise and positive feedback we get form users about BHL.
BHL is a consortium of natural history and botanical institutions. It works with legacy and biodiversity literature, digitizing it, and making it accessible through open access.
What content will be in BHL? [insert collections development map] This map can guide you to the type of content you could provide.
What does open mean? Everyone can access our content for free, and can download it for free. It also means they can access our content through APIs – people and computers. There are also data exports.
Users can also download content through BHL.
233 counties access BHL, but Africa does not constitute a large amount of traffic. It’s possible that this is because the content they want is not accessible. BHL-Africa must find out what kind of content Africa wants and how to make that available.
Before you can fundraise, you must determine what you want fundraising for – have a clear idea of mission and deliverables. Africa will have better success trying to raise money as groups in collaborative projects. BHL-Africa will have to consider what the other nodes have done and see how they need to adapt those processes for their needs.
Global BHL – Nancy Gwinn
2013-04-16 Global BHL-BHL Africa Launch.ppt
BHL now has seven global nodes: US/UK; China; Europe; Africa; Egypt; Australia; Brazil.
How does global BHL work? gBHL means Global BHL. gBHL governance has an MOU, Steering Committee, Bylaws, Officers, an Annual face-to-face meeting, and an Executive Committee.
SC has one representative from each node (at least one).
It was also agreed that the Executive Committee would have conference calls as needed to ensure sufficient communication.
However, each node operates independently in funding, contributions to BHL, and workflow. Nothing is mandated except the commitment to overall purpose and guidelines of BHL.
Current Steering Committee: Chair – Ely Wallis, BHL-Australia; Vice-Chair – Nancy Gwinn, BHL-US/UK. Secretary currently open as BHL-Europe representative left. New Secretary will be elected at next global meeting.
Three global meetings so far. 2010 and 2011 in US. 2012 in Berlin. Morocco will be meeting in 2013.
There are tools available to help each node develop their programs. This includes people, including William Ulate (global coordinator) and Martin Kalfatovic (Program Director).
You should also rely on the expertise of your BHL-Africa colleagues for support. You should also take responsibility to train each other.
Collaboration is the key. The program node will not work if only a few people do all the work. Each person involved in BHL already has a full time job. It must be a group enterprise to share the work.
Tools: Existing tools are available to BHL-Africa. This includes the Internet Archive, who provides to everyone mass scanning services and storage of files, image processing, and derivative creation. This is a major benefit to institutions. The storage and derivative creation is free – this is a major benefit of BHL. There are also mirror copies of BHL around the world, which will ensure that the content will be safe and permanently available. It will also mean that you can be more flexible with your library holdings if they are online and provides your users with content you don’t have through BHL.
Macaw: Scanning workflow and ingest tool. Allows you to get your scans created outside of Internet Archive to IA. You will not be charged for using Macaw.
Flickr: If your content is uploaded to BHL, there is an application in BHL that will allow the direct upload of images to Flickr with embedded metadata and page links.
What does gBHL expect? Content creation; audience building; content identification; partnership building. These don’t have to happen immediately. They are goals for the long run.
Content Creation: Doesn’t have to just be content published in Africa. It can be unique material in your collection published elsewhere.
We hope you will digitize content unique to core literature and African biodiversity. We are talking about library collections – monographs, journals, gray literature, reports. We also expect accurate, full metadata from all contributors. This may mean you have to enhance or improve cataloging operations.
Audience Building: Some are still building audiences within their institutional administration, but just because BHL is available, it doesn’t mean people know about it or how to use it. We expect BHL-Africa to promote BHL in your own communities and countries. SANBI will provide a lot of promotional material for use.
You should inform the African biodiversity communities, explaining to these people how they can integrate BHL content into their work and how it can be used. Talk about all of our services as well, including images. Use social media to promote as well, such as starting a blog.
Content Identification: As you begin to contribute content and use BHL, you may be able to identify gaps in literature that you can provide. You can also just report these gaps to us if you don’t hold them for other libraries around the world to scan.
BHL-US/UK has Gemini software that collects feedback from users and allows us to collaborate to correct errors with content and identify scanning candidates and collaborate to scan them.
Partnership Building: Those that sign the MOU must develop a climate of trust and collaboration and then broaden outside the group as appropriate.
Questions:
Sally: It is important to work at the institutional level. There was a lot of discussion about how we divide our regions, but it is important that we focus on working at institutional level and not worry about how we divide our regions as much.
Anne-Lise: It starts with trust. Ria and I as an example have worked together full time for three years on BHL, but we needed to work together to get to a level where we trust each other with how we work. It we don’t trust and build collaborations, we can’t produce. If we can’t produce, we can’t get funding.
BHL Copyright – Connie Rinaldo
BHLcopyright1.ppt
_BHL Permissions Form-Journal.pdf
_BHL Permissions Form-Mono.pdf
What are the copyright requirements of BHL when BHL-Africa supplies us with material?
BHL’s goal is to unlock the vast array of biodiversity literature in big libraries. Point is to provide open access. One of the first ways to do this is to expose the public domain literature.
BHL also negotiates with copyright holders so we can provide more current information. This can include all publications or only publications through a certain year.
This means material in BHL can be reused and repurposed for pretty much any purpose. We started by scanning public domain material. In US this means anything with a pre-1923 copyright date. There is almost always a risk associated with scanning, so this is a risk management topic. Each institution might have a different policy for how much risk they will take and thus how much they will scan.
We also have materials that we have permission from copyright holders to provide in BHL. As a reminder, BHL does not hold copyright on anything in BHL.
When you submit your metadata, there is specific copyright metadata that is dictated by the Internet Archive that you must apply. In the metadata fields, we must put in either:
• Public Domain: BHL considers this work is no longer under copyright protection
• No Known Copyright: As determine by the scanning institution (i.e. orphan works; you can do due diligence to identify these titles).
• In Copyright: Digitized with permission of rights holder.
We’ve had informal policy (since 2010) that if we get queries from someone claiming that a work in BHL is a copyright violation, we will take down the content. This has only happened about once or twice in our history. However, it is important that when you submit things to BHL, you know the copyright and you are prepared to take down content if it is identified to be a violation.
The copyright status of books is displayed next to each book in BHL. Volumes from the same titles might have different copyright statuses – older volumes might be public domain, but newer ones might have In Copyright Status – these will have Creative Commons licenses associated with them.
Creative Commons Licenses: Ours is a noncommercial, share alike license for content we get permission for. You can share, redistribute, or remix the work, but you must provide attribution and you can’t use it for commercial purposes.
Different Countries have different copyright laws. BHL can’t advise you on the interpretation of your own country’s copyright laws. You must consult with your librarians or maybe even lawyers to determine what your copyright laws are.
This means that works in public domain in some countries may not be in public domain in others. BHL is not legally responsible for what each institution scans. You are the one responsible for what you scan, and you will face the legal implications if you scan in-copyright content.
Ria will provide WIPO information about copyright throughout Africa that institutions can refer to.
MOU: Everyone signed an MOU. US/UK has statement that we commit to provide hosting of content by BHL under open access, public domain content or Creative Commons Attribution licenses.
To get into BHL, content needs to be submitted to Internet Archive. However, once it’s in IA, it’s free to be downloaded and reused by anyone. IA does also display the copyright statements. Be sure you supply the appropriate metadata for copyright.
BHL is open access. Material can be reused and repurposed. Know your own laws and consult with lawyers and other experts as needed. Supply the right copyright metadata.
Questions:
Sally: What did you mean about things being in public domain in some countries and not in others?
Connie: I just mean that in the US everything before 1923 is in public domain, but in the UK they cannot scan up to 1923 as public domain. So UK cannot scan as many volumes as we can. Australia is even more liberal, and can scan up to 1955, and scan more content than US can. If the content in IA was scanned by a BHL partner, we can implement a take down. If it was scanned by another institution, we cannot control taking the content down.
Sally: The metadata is the most important aspect because without that, we cannot know the status of volumes.
Collections Management – Bianca Crowley
BHLAcollectionmgmt.pptx
Handout showing BHL-US/UK institutions, whether they are scanning with IA, and how frequently they are scanning. Some institutions don’t have an IA center close to them, or they have their own scanning facilities in house and don’t use the Internet Archive (IA) for scanning. In the end, though, we integrate all of that content into IA so it can get into BHL.
I really want to understand what BHL-Africa needs so I can improve our documentation to facilitate that. Your needs will be different than our needs, but BHL-US.UK can work on getting baseline documents to support your work.
I think that BHL-Africa is sort of at step 1.5 in collections building and digitizing. Everyone starts at the beginning. The shared vision for working together to get all content accessible online was critical for helping us move forward and work together.
BHL-US/UK has taken many steps over the years, and I will explain them.
Can I confirm? Does BHL-Africa want to contribute content directly into the BHL website?
Ria: We are still a bit uncertain, but we think yes. We should explain to people what it means to get content into BHL.
Collections Management Cycle: Collections management is a continuous cycle of pre and post scanning workflows. Getting content scanned is only part of the story. The other part is managing the content. Grace and I don’t actually work in the actual scanning part. We’re focused on post scanning work and the big picture overall.
Among our consortium libraries we have staff that dedicate themselves to the entire cycle. Many are focused on both getting content scanned and post digitized workflow for improving content.
Selection Process: We use the following selection criteria. We try to focus on high yield taxonomic materials – as much content as possible. We also try to aggregate unique and rare materials into one place. We are looking to you all to tell us what your unique materials are. We also focus on permissions titles – this is in copyright content for which we work directly with copyright holders to sign license agreements to get content. We go rights holder by rights holder and sign one agreement per holder. We also receive requests from users. We have a feedback form that users can use to request for content to be scanned and added to BHL. When we get requests, we add it to our queue and scan when we can. It’s a great way to invite users to help develop the collection.
In the early days of BHL-US/UK, we broke up institutions into disciplinary areas where each institution scanned specific topics.
Finally, we ingest non-BHL content from IA. IA works with many libraries around the work, scanning the content and adding it to their collection. It’s not just BHL. Thus, we have a process that will search IA for content with specific call numbers or subjects from non-BHL members and ingest that content into BHL.
What is biodiversity content? Biodiversity covers a huge range of topics. We have a BHL collections committee to discuss collections issues. We came up with a visual representation of what we consider our core and supporting content:
http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Collection+Development+Policy. We actively scan and collect core collections and then passively collect material related to supporting subjects. We prioritize content that applies to the core subjects.
Deduplication: We try to avoid duplication of scanning where possible. It’s a difficult issue. The same items may be cataloged different ways, making it difficult to know if it’s a duplicate.
We developed deduplication tools to help us, but these haven’t been improved since they were created.
We have tools to manage deduplication of monographs and serials – two different tools. The serial tool is the scanlist. The monograph tool is the monographic deduper. The best way to determine if something has been scanned is to check BHL.
However, there is a timing issue. It’s possible that something is in the process of being scanned but not yet in BHL, so you can’t check BHL to see if anyone else is scanning it.
Our tools help fill in that scanning gap and to let people know what others are going to scan too.
We also have a way to merge titles that are duplicates. We can manually take two different titles and merge them together.
Digitization Principles for US/UK: We are a mass digitization operation. Our libraries are trying to “feed to beast.” Our funding is becoming less and less. We don’t have this same call to scan as much as possible as quickly as we can, but our workflow is based on mass digitization.
We are an access platform, not archival preservation platform.
We scan books cover to cover. We try to provide an exact digital copy of the physical book. We scan every page. We don’t scan individual articles or parts. Sometimes you might have a bound volume with multiple books inside. In that case, we do try to divide the book concept into its own piece. We tell the scanners to scan them as separate items.
We are also experimenting with incorporating field notebooks, but our main focus is the book.
Our infrastructure supports book-like objects. We don’t yet have maps or photographs in BHL. We’re working on solutions to incorporate born-digital materials.
Ria: What will you do with field notebooks? What about OCR?
Bianca: We’re really experimenting right now. We’re trying to figure out how we can address OCR.
We scan directly through Internet Archive. Some libraries don’t use IA. They do their own scanning. You all will have to work to figure out what digitization services will work for you.
We pay IA to scan the books, including de-skewing and cropping, IA also bring in metadata from library catalogues and create derivatives. Some libraries scan both with IA and with their own machines.
We do encourage color scanning.
Each BHL member has its own workflow. Getting books scanned, getting metadata sent to digitization facilities, and reprocessing books is all different for each institution. The frequency of scanning is also different by each institution. Each institution must figure out what works for them.
Metadata: We have some metadata principles. Our baseline standards in US/UK is MARC. We derive metadata displaying in BHL from MARC records. We aggregate records from each BHL member library into BHL. Cataloging may be different across institutions, so we may end up with different catalog records for the same book in BHL. We don’t make changes to MARC records before it gets into BHL. We can also edit metadata displayed in BHL manually, but this is not editing the MARC records from institutions.
If you have your own in-house scanning facility, you have to use the MACAW software to get your content into IA so it can get into BHL. The BHL website is hosted through Missouri Botanical Garden.
Digitization Workflow: We have three units of content.
Titles: In BHL, this means book and journal titles. The conceptual unit of the content.
Items: This refers to volumes – the physical pieces.
Segments: This is new with the new user interface. This is article content. This is also book chapters or even protologues. This is any smaller piece of chronological pages within a larger item.
Metadata: we need MARC records and the volume information. If you send a journal, you need to provide the volume information. We also need metadata about the individual pages. We need to know how the pages are arranged and what the pages are. We need descriptive and structural metadata. MACAW software supports this and helps us articulate this information. IA articulates this for us.
We have two scanning methods. You can scan through the IA scribe machine or scan through your own in house equipment.
Content integration: How can you get it all together once it’s scanned. The IA Scribe machines do the scanning and do the integration. When you use in-house equipment, you need an additional tool to integrate this content. MACAW allows you to do that.
We then harvest all content in IA for BHL into the BHL database at Missouri Botanical Garden for display in BHL.
We take feedback from users in two different forms. They can tell us if they come across problems or provide requests for scanning. Since we’re a mass digitization project, this is critical. We can’t review everything ourselves, so we rely on our users to tell us if there is a problem. We follow up with users to let them know that we will correct the issues.
We have a back end administrative database through which we can edit and curate content.
This cycle continues over and over.
We all work autonomously. Each institution has their own needs, staff, timezones, copyright laws, management. They must answer to their institutions first. We also come together under that shared vision and work collectively on BHL. We trust each other to decide what’s best for each of us.
Shared vision is to get as much biodiversity content digitized, online, and accessible.
Collaboration: We communicate and document regularly. BHL-US/UK can serve as a model for collaboration. We need tools to support this collaboration. Thus, we do what we can to communicate across timezones and institutions. We don’t have a shared drive for BHL. We use tools like dropbox, wikis, Google Docs. We also have monthly BHL staff calls led by Bianca. We do a round robin to find out how each institution is doing. We also try to have face to face meetings but we can’t always do that.
We do pay for one tool, and that’s the issue tracking software. Traditionally used by IT to track bugs, but we use it for digitization workflow. It helps us communicate with the granularity we need. It also helps us keep documentation about each step in the process.
Questions:
Anne-Lise: Library of Congress call numbers. Is this Dewey?
Bianca: No, they are different.
Anne-Lise: We are busy integrating two catalogs. One is UDC, one is Dewey.
Survey Feedback – Lawrence Monda
Feedback responses.pptx
12 institutions have signed the MOU. See survey results.
• Conclusion: 90% have collections of biodiversity information for digitization
o If you don’t have content to contribute, you must think about what else you can contribute
• Moderate IT Support and Infrastructure available for most institutions.
• Most institutions have titles to be added to 1000 African books
• Catalogue for collections exist in most institutions however knowledge of standards and MARC records is minimal
• Different formats for archiving being used and little knowledge on imaging requirements.
William: What do you think about those answers from the group? For some, there is not much material recognized. Some are in a very basic stage. I’m glad to hear that MARC records is not a problem, but those without catalog records want to think about starting to catalog these.
Anne-Lise: I think this survey explains Africa. We can see where the problems lie. This is what I thought would come out. We’d have hot spots where there’s lots being done. We have institutions that will need our support. For me personally it emphasizes that we need to get the GBIF people to commit to someone to do the work for them.
William: Am I correct in thinking that most of the content you’ve listed is under copyright?
Anne-Lise: Many of them are institutional publications.
Lawrence: Within these institutions are there copyright policies available also?
Anne-Lise: Yes. In our case material that is not allowed to go out is identified by the group working on it. They all must give SANBI libraries a copy of what they are doing and they must indicate whether this is available for digitization and open access or not.
Bianca: Are we going to be able to see all of the surveys that were submitted?
Lawrence: Yes, we have an excel sheet where we loaded everything.
Ria: It seems to me that some people completed the form with biodiversity collections in mind and some with the broader collections in mind. The thought was for the biodiversity collection, though.
William: We are very far from 1000 books on the list of books to scan.
Eva: We need to support each other. We have a lot of institutional information on PDF already, we just need to get the metadata first. We need to set processes in place so we are all in the same place when we upload.
Ria: I think the group as a whole must make sure that before you put anything on BHL, you must make sure you are aware of the copyright laws and rights in your country.
Lawrence: If we put something onto BHL and we have a copyright suite, what happens?
Ria: They will tell you there is a copyright infringement, you tell them you’re sorry and you take it down.
Lawrence: How do we know that some of these books are not already on BHL?
William: You have to search BHL. If it doesn’t appear, then it’s probable that no one digitized it. However, there might be a chance that someone is in the process of digitizing it. Usually, however, it’s an indicator that it’s not there.
Bianca: The reason why I’m interested in hard copies of surveys is that you’ve listed good publications for the US/UK to avoid scanning. The exchange of information about what you want to digitize should happen so we don’t scan it in the US/UK. Also, we can only scan up to 1922. Many of the years listed in the survey are much later than that. You’re the best people to get permission or to know publications from your home institutions. I don’t anticipate there being a major duplication issue. A copyright policy in some sense, not in terms of copyright law, but a take down policy that you can give to users, would be good for BHL-Africa to create. If someone claims copyright infringement, we verify who they are and we remove it.
Anne-Lise: A few institutions have exchange policies, where we exchange the publications we publish at our institutions.
Lawrence: How are you going to help each other?
Ria: We’ve got Macaw up and running. If everything is up and running then William will test it on Thursday. Then others might be able to use that to load existing PDFs to BHL. You could also send the files to me with the correct metadata and I can push it through the Macaw directly.
Bianca: We need to talk about how Macaw works before you make promises about what you can do for others.
Eva: We might have bandwidth, but we need permission to use our server.
Lawrence: Would you be in a position to be connecting to BHL, from your desk. Also, could you upload content via Macaw, meaning you have to stay connected for a long time?
William: Some challenges will be not only what tools are there but how you use them. You must try the tools to see if they work for you and your resources. The first thing that you can have is an attitude that this will work. We can collaborate for contributions.
Lawrence: If some have content to scan but no way to scan it, how are we going to get them scanned?
Sally: I think maybe those institutions that have material but can’t scan it, if the rest of us know the list of what it is, if other libraries have it, we can scan it for them.
Anne-Lise: Those institutions that have the books but not the facilities must be the ones responsible for asking others to digitize.
Lawrence: I’m posing this question so that tomorrow when we work on the strategic workplan we have this information to include.
Jackson: Maybe we need to look at where the capacity in Southern Africa, East Africa, West Africa for digitizing is? We have challenges for sending books to other institutions for scanning, but we need to identify areas where we need to build capacity and develop strategies for building that capacity.
BHL Infrastructure – William Ulate
The BHL Infrastructure.pptx
New partners and geographies imply that you are not alone. All your experiences help build all the global nodes.
Global Replication and Serving: Content has been uploaded to Internet Archive. From there we have a copy in Woods Hole of the images. London has got part of the body of images, as well as Egypt. China also hopes to put up a copy of the images. This helps with preserving the content.
Making this replication is not as easy as it sounds. Just to move the content from Woods Hole to London we set up processes to copy, but they didn’t run as we hoped. Processes failed from either side of the connection, so we ended up getting disk drives, sending them to London, Egypt and China, and copying them.
Sometimes it’s better that you just make a copy of the content, get it in another place, upload it there, and keep on working. We are going to have to work with metadata, and it can be more easily done than uploading from institutions.
Sharing data means explaining things over and over to figure it out.
BHL shares data through APIs, data exports, and URLs.
Repatriation of Information: BHL is a project of repatriation of information. Much of the content we have in BHL is about biodiversity hotspots. In the case of Africa, we must figure out how to move that content within Africa. That implies moving them to places where people can digitize and upload it.
Tools: Scanlist, Monographic Deduper, Portal, Macaw, Gemini and Feedback form. Macaw allows us to handle book information even when you’re not working with IA scribe machines.
What is a scribe machine? It’s a large scanning machine from Internet Archive. There are two cameras, each that digitize two pages at a time. It’s for mass digitization.
Another alternative is to use Macaw. It was developed by Joel Richard at Smithsonian. It’s based on the BHL paginator. Smithsonian had the funds to develop a tool to upload content scanned outside IA workflow to IA and then BHL.
The code is available online in Github. University of Pretoria has a copy of Macaw running. It’s a web-based tool. It doesn’t mean that you have to install anything. You connect to the URL and run the process.
It has a dashboard with basic statistics. It says how many items are ready to be scanned; how many are in progress, reviewed, etc. It also lists the items that are in progress, which is filterable.
You can load items by hand (add one item, identifier, metadata, etc.). We need the MARCXML associated with all the uploaded scans. You can also upload .csv files or create automatically through custom imports, but you still need MARCXML for each item.
It allows you to upload the images via the browser. You can select the files from your computer and upload them. You can import those images after you’ve scanned them and uploaded them to a network location. You then upload them from that network.
You can import JPEG and PDF files. I’m not sure about tiff. If you upload a PDF, it can break it up into individual pages the way we need for BHL.
Joel Richard is the main developer, but also the folks from Australia have helped out in some adaptations.
Reviewing metadata: You can review the book through thumbnails, page views, and metadata for each page. The thumbnail sizes can be changed to help you see them more closely. You can assign page numbers, page types, volume, year information. You can assign multiple types to each page and captions. The process is such that every time you do a change, it gets saved.
The standard metadata that Macaw allows you to assign is suitable for BHL.
You can also schedule the books to upload so that the server will automatically take care of it.
Before you can use Macaw, you need to get an account with Internet Archive.
The way this could work is you could try to remotely connect to the installation at University of Pretoria and see if your bandwidth is enough to upload the content. If not, we’ll have to work out an alternative. Once it’s in Macaw, you will go in to assert page metadata and then it will be uploaded to IA and then BHL.
You can see what’s been uploaded by others, so that might mean that the way others could contribute would be to paginate items uploaded by others.
Questions:
Grace: Is Macaw free?
William: Yes. The code is available online in Github. You can go get it now and install it if you want to.
There is a page in the folder with more Macaw information.
William: Macaw right now must be installed through a server. University of Pretoria has installed a version of Macaw that is virtualized. Thus, anyone without an installation of Macaw can just log in to University of Pretoria’s Macaw installation and upload books.
Grace: Is Macaw compatible with other repositories?
William: All you have to have is a browser. It should be compatible with any browser.
Bianca: Are you transferring files from one institution to the server in Pretoria or Internet Archive?
William: You are transferring your files to Pretoria. Then it will go to Internet Archive.
William will test the whole upload process through University of Pretoria on Thursday.
Bianca: We do have metadata documentation now, but it’s outdated. As Macaw is finalized we can also finalize our documentation. The metadata really needs to be standardized among the global nodes, especially if you want to work within the BHL website. Maybe tomorrow we can talk about how we exchange information between the nodes.
Social Media – Grace Costantino
BHL Africa Social Media Presentation.ppt
Which are using social media: LOTS of people
Tools: Twitter, LinkedIn, Blog, Facebook
Caveat: BHL US/UK did not start using social media for several years, first governance, then mission, program development, no need to start social media right now
BHL US/UK can collaborate on social media, see the blog post regarding the launch
http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2013/04/bhl-africa-officially-launches.html
BHL US/UK uses 5 tools: Twitter, Facebook, Blog, Pinterest, Flickr ==> additional platforms to share content & engage with new user communities
Collaborative effort, takes lots of different people
Takes work to make sure we're engaging & responsive with users, work also to monitor the platforms for user interactions, &etc
Benefits: project updates & progress - press release outlet, communicate with users about small and large news
tell the story behind the content in the collection ==> Context, explaining the importance of the book, you can't do this in the BHL website itself, social media provides platforms for this additional information
reach new audiences ==> reach beyond original core community, now beyond taxonomists we can reach citizen scientists, science historians, science educators, artists, these other users may not know about books in BHL from our website alone
go to the platforms where users already are; having CONVERSATIONS with your users, makes BHL a personal experience; stats demonstrate how social media clearly increases audiences for BHL content; the more we use social media, the more our audience grows; our goal is really to drive people back to BHL, we link to BHL via FB, Twitter &etc
uncover new aspects of the collection ==> Flickr is a great example, most people don't know that we have fantastic images, we make these images more discoverable and usable via Flickr
have a process for uploading images directly from BHL into Flickr
Flickr has been performing really well, over 3.8 million views on our Flickr content, now over 72,000 images
People can download and reuse images in various ways
reaching new audiences - now artists are using our content! BHL content now in wall paper, wedding invitations, users will find content on social media and find new and interesting ways to reuse our images
Benefits: project updates, uncover hidden aspects, reach new audiences
on FB we try to post 2 times a day, biodiversity quizzes, post with images do better, news related posts
Twitter, try to post 3-4 times a day but we send as many tweets out as we need to
Blog, highlight a different book each week, news and updates as needed, interviews with users on our blog, allows us to learn from users about how to improve BHL
Flickr, we can create sets of images and collections like African biodiversity collection!
Pinterest, we can share groups of related images
What do you think BHLA would want to do for social media
Not just about reaching audiences in Africa but it's about reaching audiences all over the world
What do you think you'd like to do for BHLA re: social media?
Are people allowed to use social media at work? Most yes, but Sally no, SANBI can use it before work, after and during lunch but she has to provide a list of approved FB pages for ex.
Some countries block it completely
In Kenya, gov approved use of social media, so Laurence's inst. has used social media
What matters is whether or not your producing, are you finishing your work
Statistics resonate well with management to show how sm is useful; we have a metrics dashboard we can show you
How are you using social media right now? news updates, SANBI biodiversity group through LinkedIn to exchange information with colleagues?
If you're already active on social media, why not use it for BHLA promotion?
Good outlet for communicating with users about what they want
Communicate via social media about collections but get responses via email, some comments
1 person in the library, she does all the library jobs so she does social media as well
use ICT and e resources to communicate
3 in the dept, divide up the press release work, but 1 to do BHL, some social media, but boss does formal press release, ICT person does other meetings and events
Laurence equals peer organization
blog about health information in Africa, collect stories about what's happening and repost
UNairobi uses FB to spread the word about trainings for eresources
Sally allied with Rhodes univeristy library, has own webpage with lib guide with blog, very good way to publish information, SIAB has a website w/ Facebook, post news about what's going on with a feature story
Social media in Africa is still - the way it is used could be different than the way it is used in the US - Kenya is one of the countries in Africa known to be strong in social media, many threads coming from Kenya, many of the threads about social life and politics, in terms of communicating science we're really not there, you hardly find tweets about new pubs or what's happening in the sci world
We can try b/c it has to begin somewhere, Jackson inst. does use FB and Twitter for news updates but not sure how successful this is
what audiences are you reaching with what platform
developing audience profiles
collaborative approach to promote particular content is a good way to start
Would you want to send posts to Grace to funnel
Any concerns about RTs being ignored? Most Twitter advice says that the more tweets you send out the better, its about when you send out tweets, don't be afraid to resend content,
Can be daunting b/c you're putting things out there for the whole world to see
users really interested in having a conversation and learning more about the people behind the scenes
older researchers may prefer e-newsletters, a simple email with a list of links can be just as helpful
Good to combine different strategies to reach different audiences old and new
Not just about your institution, it's about talking to the whole world
Be deliberate
Important to think about how you want to connect with users
UNairobi it would be impossible to contact the scientists, most of them are quite "mature" they've always trashed social media thinking that it's for children, best thing that works is email
Scientists really divided between analog and digital
Maybe have a monthly, weekly, have summary of what you have
Various social media can integrate really well, you can have all your accounts going into email, trial and error, sometimes there's too much and hard to filter out
But even generations that are only in email can still get content from social media into email
You can have both email & social media outlets but challenge is to figure out balance re: what information goes best per platform/tool
Forums are also good
Business Day = daily newspaper in SA - they've requested that Anne-Lise provide interview; their librarian picked up on the IV opportunity via social media (Twitter)
Use of personal accounts can be tricky
FB research says no more than 2 posts a day
Twitter research says you can't tweet enough
Breakout Session Notes
Social Media/Outreach/Communication
Audiences to reach for Communication/Outreach: Researchers/taxonomists/students/policy makers/librarians/educators/citizen scientists
Goals for outreach: Increasing awareness of BHL and its services; increasing usage of BHL website; Getting buy-in of the organization, which ensure sustainability; educating people about biodiversity issues.
First Step: Develop a communication plan.
• The plan should include organization of survey for users to determine what platforms they want to communicate on and what type of information they want to receive.
• Plan should also outline the benefits for participating in social to use to convince upper management to devote resources to the practice of social media.
Organizing the Outreach Effort: It was suggested that a subcommittee from the Steering Committee be designated as responsible for social media and outreach. These members will liaison with institutions to organize outreach efforts.
It was decided that it would be best to have a central BHL-Africa account for social media, rather than having institutions send it out individually.
While engaging in full social media does not need to be a priority at this point, it was suggested that we should start with low hanging fruit – develop a BHL-Africa Facebook page on which you can engage with users, garner support and excitement for the project, and develop initial awareness. The Facebook page could also be used by BHL-Africa participants to communicate, collaborate, and ask questions.
Also important to note is that all communication doesn’t have to be technical. It can also be in person communication and outreach with users.
Communication is also about building ways to communicate internally. That includes perhaps developing a listserv for BHL-Africa communication.
Collections/Copyright Notes
What do we want to collect in BHL Africa
Type of Material
Publications by BHL Africa members. Start with internal publications
Governmental publications are public domain. They can be put on BHL immediately.
Stay with collection that you have that are rich or complete runs.
Send out survey to stake holders/staff to ask what they want scanned.
Should BHL Africa have a repository where members can send scanned documents and PDFs?
There was a question of if a PDF can be uploaded to BHL. In short no. But in the future yes using MaCaw. Internet Archive requires that every page of a book is a separate page image. Any PDF will need to be first taken apart into separate pages.
Since we are not ready to upload PDFs should a list be created and submitted to a BHL Africa coordinator? This seems like it might be extra work if McCaw is going to be ready soon. But an estimate of the overall quantity might be useful. List should be coordinated regionally. Perhaps create a wiki and list uploaded to regional sections of the wiki.
There is a MaCaw installation set up at the University of Pretoria.
University of Pretoria is in negotiation to buy Scribe(s) from Internet Archive. Southern Africa BHL members will be able to send materials to University of Pretora to be scanned on Scribe and will pay the University for this service.
BHL Africa should write a grant proposal to get funding, but the group needs to show some proof of ability to scan and upload content They want to see a proof of concept before funding. BHL Africa can use the current BHL to show that this is possible and this is how it will look. BHL is willing to support BHL Africa on any grant proposals. Collaboration is attractive to finding agencies and BHL has a proven and well established record of collaboration.
Who makes the decision on quality of content selected? Each librarian has to make those decisions hopefully guided by their users.
There is a suggesting for guidelines to be created by the project to help each librarian make selections of content. BHL Africa should create a collection development policy. A group should be formed and work on this policy
BHL should incorporate the Daisy platform for sight impaired.
Special Collections
Start with the older most interesting, beautiful and high demand public domain
Day Three: April 17 2013
Topics to Discuss for Timelines:
1. Metadata
2. Types of Materials
3. Collection Management
4. Digitization hotspots
5. Booklists
- what is already done/digitized?
- what needs to be done/digitized?
6. Funding
University of Pretoria (UP) has a Macaw installation up and running, William to work with UP to continue testing
Digitization hotspots: Areas of active digitization
Currently only in 2 regions
South Africa -- Sally, Ria
East Africa -- Asha, Esther (a bit)
MOST IMPORTANT: Promotion of BHL Africa -- Ubuntu (humanity, free)
Of current BHLA regions (3), 2 are active in
Plan for Steering Committee to be 6 people all together
Up to us to get other regions on board
Plan to have a total of 4 regions eventually
BHLA Workplan - 2 year timeline
- Metadata & Types of materials documentation needed | Bianca & Ria | due 3-6 mo.
- BHL US/UK has BHL Digitization Specifications document that needs updating, Bianca to report back once updates complete, dependent upon Macaw development
- Digitization hotspots | Jackson for East Africa, Sally & Ria for South Africa | due 3 mo.
- Booklists:
- Template needed to keep itemized list of content already digitized and content intended for digitization, would be good to have page counts as well | Laurence to propose template | due ASAP
- List of what has already been digitized | Asha for East Africa, Anne-Lise for South Africa | due 3 mo.
- List of content that BHLA would like to have digitized/intent to scan list | regional groups to work together to figure out | 6 mo.
Climate change is important subject matter
Zulu medicinals
TDWG hopefully in Kenya in Nov 2014 - good milestone to have to present on BHLA progress
Laurence to set up a BHLA listserv for the group
What about a collection development policy? Collections break-out session met yesterday and touched on this issue
Connie: you don't have to have a policy right away, BHL US/UK digitized books without a collection development policy for a couple years
There is a need for a group that can work on developing this policy
Policy is just a guideline
Who will be on this committee?
SC to appoint a group to develop a collection development policy
Funding to be considered after current action items are completed
What about a training component for digitization best practices?
Need for a training-the-trainer programs
ITOCA runs excellent training programs
Gracian could meet with Ria to discuss this
ITOCA background: WHO - Research for Life, training on the use of e-resources, products of FAO, UNEPO, WHO but currently no digitization training
Anthony has proposal to go to US to receive digitization training
ITOCA could possibly add a component for digitization training
What about recruitment of additional BHLA members?
Need for a communication plan (which will include social media)
Anne-Lise to send a letter to institutional directors to clearly state:
- -what BHLA is
- -what the benefits of BHLA are
- -which BHLA institutional partners are already on board
- -the support of BHL US/UK and the global BHL community
Everyone to send Anne-Lise directors names
SANBI to possibly have a small tea to get other smaller institutions in South Africa on board
Kenya has a detailed plan for recruitment broken down by area: universities, NGOs, research community, &etc.
SC needs to set up some regular meeting dates and to send updates to group
It was noted that it is often necessary to have 4 weeks advance notice for meeting invitees
Many contacts through biodiversity projects among Kenya, Barundi, & Rwanda
If someone in interested in BHLA how should the group go about introducing them / inviting them to join?
Would be good to send names of potential interested parties to SC
SC to contact them and reiterate that relationship already in progress with existing institution in their region
ELECTIONS
Elections BHL Africa April 17, 2013
One representative from each institution that signed the MOU will vote for 2 regional candidates. Regions represented: Eastern Africa and Southern Africa
From MOU: Duties of group representative (from MOU): Steering Committee to establish standards, policies and priorities, approve budget, promote globally, identify activities, evaluate performance against planned outcomes, provide advice and guidance for fund raising, authorize working groups and committees, develop criteria for new members, approve applications, approve by-laws
Meetings will be via email or skype (can have a proxy)
May withdraw by written notice with 3 months notice
Steering Committee can revoke membership of institutional members
Actions do not require physical meeting
Nominations made by one person for regional SC member, with a second from another regional member and nominees must accept in order to be voted on.
Lawrence Monda was appointed as Technical Director
Voters:
Ashah Owano
Resource Centre Manager
National Museums of Kenya
Ms. Loi Namugenyi
Science and Technology Information Services
Uganda National Council for Science and Technology, Uganda
Esther Obachi
Librarian, University of Nairobi, Kenya
Preetika Bhanderi ,Project Assistant
African Conservation Centre
KAREN, Nairobi, Kenya
Anthony M. Wasike, Chief-Librarian
Kenya Wildlife Service, Nairobi, Kenya
Ria Groenewald, Digitization Coordinator
Library Services, University of Pretoria
A. Fourie, Mary Gunn Library
Pretoria
SANBI
Jackson Muhirwe
IT Officer
Lake Victoria Basin Commission
East African Community
Patience Agabirwe
Library Assistant
Kyambogo University, Uganda
Eddah Wasike
International Center of Insect Physiology & Ecology ICIPE
Nairobi, Kenya
Information Specialist
Lawrence Monda
ICT Manager
National Museums of Kenya
*Nominees for the Southern African region, Southern Africa: Ria Groenewald and Anne-lise Fourie (the only voting members from Southern Africa) and so they are the representatives.
Eastern region nominees:
Ashah nominated and seconded by Anthony; Ashah accepts
Patience nominated Loi: seconded by Jackson, Loi accepts
Esther: nominated by Preetika seconded by Lawrence, accepts
*Ashah (8 votes) and Loi (7 votes) are the elected representatives on the Steering Committee.
BHL Africa Chair chosen by Steering Committee: Anne-Lise Fourie
