BHL EC Call 5 Sep 2013

BHL EC Call

5 September 2013

Attending:

Agenda:

New Membership Structure

• Need to officially form the membership committee; recommended that an EC member be chair and keep to a small-ish group
• Committee charge:
  The BHL Membership Committee is responsible for recruitment of potential members, review of membership applications and submission of recommendations regarding membership applications to the BHL Executive Committee. The Membership Committee will have 3 members appointed by the Executive Committee. Members will serve a term of 3 years with 1/3 members cycling off the Committee each year. In the event of a resignation of a Committee member, the EC will select a replacement to complete the term of that individual. [Draft by Connie]
• Chicago Botanical Garden, Leora Siegal interested in Affiliate status
• Stewardship of BHL members. As we approach the BHL renewal year, EC members should perform some stewardship of current members to encourage renewal

BHL Secretariat and SIL staffing News

• Gilbert B. will be leaving the Smithsonian Libraries (last day 1 Nov 13); he had done a lot on the social media side of thing. On upcoming staff calls, Bianca will try and recruit help from the staff.
• Bianca will be on maternity leave starting in early December; she plans to return to work in early March; we'll work out a filling behind plan before then. There will be some areas that we hope to ask other BHL staff to assist (BHL staff and collections call agenda and organization, etc.)

Discussion of the BHL "Link Out" document

• MRK will send out document by COB Wednesday
• Decision Points
  • Should BHL host metadata for content hosted on third party websites?
  • Should BHL host metadata only citations (with no links to any existing content)?
  • If yes to either of the above:
    • what is the selection criteria? [Collection Development]
    • what is the workflow and assignment of workload? [Technical/Data Analyst]
    • what is the impact on tech development and user interface? [Technical]
    • what is the impact on user expectations and overall mission of BHL?
  • If no to either of these, what is the impact on the GNA commitment?

Misc. Updates

• Pan-BHL Scanning Update. As per Bianca's message sent out earlier today; we released $12,500 of the allocated $25,000 [≈ Per capita income - United Kingdom, 2005] to the group. We had a little glitch in the IA contract because they needed to re-define the UK scanning price, rather than delay the start of scanning for everyone, I split the funds and as soon as the UK portion of the contract is in place, the rest of the funds will be available and Kew and NHM can join in.
• BHL/EOL Tech meeting and Data Transfer in Woods Hole. John Mignault, Joel Richard will travel to MBL to work on data transfer from the MBL cluster. MRK, WU, and Joe DeVeer will join the for a discussion with the EOL tech team since Bob Corrigan will also be there (September 24-25)

Upcoming Travel and Meetings

• Master list of known upcoming meetings

Technical and Global Update (William)

Clustering: Mike has been fine-tuning the clustering after the algorithm.
See Related To at: http://beta.biodiversitylibrary.org/part/5894#/summary
In the case of comparing the content from BioStor to itself, he's found several interesting issues, probably things he's inherited from his sources.
For example, two different article records whose only difference is 2 pages is usually the case when one article has the title page and an additional blank page and the other one doesn't. See for example:

• - http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/2317290, and
• - http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/2317288 .

Also there's been some cases where two separated parts of the same article, each one has a different DOI but in other cases, the different articles can be joined by the same DOI.
There's a (still hidden) report in the Admin interface for the clustering at: http://admin.biodiversitylibrary.org/reportrecentlyclusteredsegments.aspx
Articles with Titles of Sections, not the subtitles. For example, "Proceedings of Learned Societies" appear several times in the same volume, different pages:

• - http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/2365582
• - http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/2256365
• - http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/2365814

RefBank & Solr: Virtual Machines for RefBank & Solr are being implemented by MBG IT Staff by the end of September.

NEH Art of Life: Waiting for Ant or someone at MBL (Patrick Leary) to help with the installation of the functionality that the Book Reader uses to extract images.

CONABIO: Had a Conference with CONABIO staff. They wanted to know about the way BHL works and how they could compliment their goal to digitize old, rare, books or those with limited availability or that are important for Mexico. They would go with the results to CONABIO's Director, Dr. José Sarukan. They would like to have a Workshop in December with the relevant stakeholders from Mexico and have William present them in Mexico.

Other/Round Robin

On Call: Martin, Nancy, Susan, William,, Connie

The committee reviewed the master list of upcoming meetings and annotated it accordingly. A future discussion will determine which meetings BHL will be in attendance and which will be funded with member dues. We discussed the creation of the membership committee and which member of the Exec committee should chair the membership committee. The responsibility as committee chair should be tied into a "board" position and not a personality. The Vice Chair (Connie) will be acting chair until the Exec face to face meeting in October. She will recommend 3 other potential committee members --the group discussed who those members will be and Connie will invite them to join for a term or either one or two years.

The Chair of this group will be the Vice-Chair or Secretary, to be determined. There will be on 1 year term and 2 2 year terms to allow flexibility.
The membership committee should also decide on the kind of outreach BHL should be doing for affiliate members...and follow up with organizations that want to be associated -- The L.A. County Museum and Chicago Botanical Garden.

Exec group was assigned institutions to contact re: renewing membership. Nancy: USGS,Smithsonian, L.C. NAL. Connie: MCZ, Harvard Bot. Cornell, NHM, FMNH. Susan: NYBG, Kew, MOBOT, AMNH and Martin: CAS, MBL/WHOI. Will discuss future follow up with other interested parties i.e. Drexel/Acad. Nat. Sci. and the Field Museum.
Secretariat Staffing News. Gilbert will be leaving soon. His departure will effect the social media involvement. Interns at SI may be able to help. Bianca will be going on maternity leave in December and will return in March. She will be asking for help running collections call and staff calls.
Pan BHL scanning funds were released and with a portion of the total allocation held back until London contract is signed. Additional funds will be released for UK members.
Susan reported problems with the Princeton scanning center and will share photos with this group of a batch of books returned in plastic garbage bags. Will follow-up one she has conversation with Robert Miller
Singapoe has returned the contract and are anxious to become partners. The scanning of their titles will be done by Harvard Botany. Still not sure if they will join as full members or as part of another node.
The data transfer will be happening this week and several staff from the TAG will be going to Woods Hole.
martin distributed the Link Out Document William and Bianca pulled together. There was discussion about our compliance with the the deliverables described in the GNA grant.
We delivered the articles and justified the change with the new interface. Currently the link out is to EOL, Species 2000 etc. Concern that we will not be able to deliver everything that was proposed. There are two categories of link out --1 to external repositories like JSTOR and Madrid and the other to just citations. -- we did integrate Citebank to citations with no content. Discussion on how to maintain the user experience if we take away functionality of linking to citations with no content...discussion on how users can see the display in the dashboard -- if these records remain suppressed --can there be a button for citations only? We need user feedback to better determine which direction to go with this. We also need to develop selection criteria for those site we want to link out to. Also need to consider the work load and work flow and do additional testing. Can hold it in the Beta site and try to get external sites to put links for BHL in their sites so researchers can easily link back to BHL. Can test it with a small set of providersr/vetted sites like Pensoft. William will send link to the Beta site. Not opening metadata harvesting world-wide.. Must remain open access.
Tech update: William met with CONABIO reps this week and they want to be the promoter of rare, scarce or unavailable content in Mexico. They are interested in knowing what schemas to follow and what hardware/software they need. and would like to hold a workshop to other Mexican stakeholders to seek out interest and try to figure out what the next steps would be in getting content into BHL and possible becoming partner or creating node. They may be an associate member or dues paying partner--
Nancy will follow up and be in touch with the head of CONABIO to find out how they want to participate. -- They will have another meeting in Mexico City in December.