BHL Institutional Council Conference Call March 12, 2008
BHL Insitutional Council Conference Call March 12, 2009
Nancy Gwinn, Judy Warnement, Doug Holland, Connie Rinaldo, Tom Garnett, Tom Baione
March 12 Thursday at 11 a.m. EST.
Topics:
I. Agenda for BHL IC Meeting next week/Logistics
Need mac addresses if wireless access is desired at Harvard.
Tom is working on the agenda. Topics so far:
Doug, Judy and Susan proposal about work on botanical indices (TL2)
Discussion of internationalization of the BHL
Two new applications for membership (ANSP and Cal Acad)
Strategic plan draft
update on BHL Architecture meeting
Discussion about allocating scanning funding
Status update on MacArthur-Sloane proposal
Sustainability issues
What can be discussed at dinner? Perhaps a preliminary discussion about membership criteria and benefits.
II. Update on China visit
Jim Edwards, Cyndi Parr and Tom visited Keping Ma in China with the idea of beginning a partnership. Dr. Ma had assembled major players at Chinese Academy of Sciences. Cyndi, Jim and Tom gave presentations/. There is a lot going on in China--they have all the pieces but haven't assembled them. They are very interested in fully aligning with EOL and using BHL as a way to do their digitizing. They want to establish a BHL mirror site. They have digitized more than 2 million pages of Chinese biodiversity literature: page images, hand-corrected OCR, loaded into their systems. They want to create a node and they are ready to move and have own money. They like that we are open access and a mass that can be queried as a whole. Posted on wiki as China BHL
China+BHL MOBOT and Harvard have been involved in contemporary China flora. Contemporary one is funded in the US. We should be sure the current project managers are aware of the historical ones but must be done with thought in mind that China has not yet committed to BHL.
III. Update on BHL Europe
Adrian Smales (IT/NHM) and Henning Scholz were at the BHL Architecture meeting. They will be doing lots of development on our system. They will have a mirror site but not a completely different system. They will add features to existing infrastructure: multilingual interface, robust de-duping and possibly collection analysis tool. They will also contribute what has already been digitized and will add more. The kick-off BHL Europe meeting will be in May. BHL-Europe is under the umbrella of the Europeana project. Tom and Chris will be attending and presenting about BHL.
