BHL Institutional Council Conference Call September 18, 2009

BHL IC Conference Call
09/18/09

Present: Tom Garnett, Doug Holland, Judy Warnement, Larry Curry, Jean Farrington, Susan Fraser, Nancy Gwinn, Tom Baione, Elizabeth Babcock, Chris Freeland, Danianne Mizzy, Connie Rinaldo.
Minutes: prepared by Connie Rinaldo with edits by Garnett

Agenda:
Director’s Updates
Transparency and communication (Susan Fraser, Tom Garnett)
Technical changes (Chris Freeland)
Appointment of Deputy Director. (Cathy Norton)
Ingesting of biodiversity texts from the California Digital Library. (Tom Garnett)

1. Recent developments: Moore Foundation Proposal to be submitted next week to fund globalization of the BHL: Chris explained that there was no funding for globalization of BHL; Moore foundation was interestest and provided a letter and then a funding request; Hope is that funds would cover Tech Director for 2 years.

2. Tom was invited to attend a meeting at the Sloan Foundation (included Robert Darnton, Pamela Samuelson (UC Berkeley), Maura Marx, Deanna Marcum, HATHI Trust, Brewster Kahle, Erich Mueller (Wikipedia), Jim Neal (Columbia), Anne Kenney (Cornell) and others. Idea was to catalyze ideas for broad based mass digitizing effort with multiple funding sources. Numbers of 300 million to 500 million were tossed around. Careful analysis of Google’s role. This will lead to more meetings with nationwide approach to keep it open and public. Tom Garnett will keep BHL IC updated on results flowing from the Sloan meeting.

3. Transparency and communication (Susan Fraser, Tom Garnett): Susan noted that this phone conversation is extremely useful but doesn’t happen enough especially with all the new partners. Need a way to communicate to everyone in the group. She noted that she needs to be accountable to NYBG about the project. Tom agreed--Need better and more transparent communication. Some suggestions include 2 face to face institutional council meeting per year, summaries of recent developments from the Director, serendipitous meetings like the upcoming meeting relegated to the IMLS grant in California where many BHL IC members will be in attendance or other partial gatherings--like ALA where whoever is around can meet. Gwinn raised concerns that such partial meetings not substitute for full quorums. Gwinn thinks 2 face to face meetings per year is a good idea. She also wondered if Tom could send an email every Friday morning reviewing the week's developments so he doesn't have to do big updates. Several thought this is a great idea. Gives us fodder for monthly discussions. Tom used to arrange a rotating phone call with each director--should he do this again? Judy noted that if the monthly phone calls were really monthly, it would be helpful. We should just set a date and have the call and who makes it makes it. Monthly calls--Tom will send a schedule for the year. Susan suggested we should have a calendar of upcoming meetings would help us decide what meetings we should each attend or send someone to. Cathy noted that we only budgeted for 1 IC meeting per year and we would all have to contribute our own funds.

Bianca had a conference call with some of the botany librarians about collections analysis--Susan suggested we should have reports on her activities. Tom can report on her activities to us. Tom B. noted that collections analysis is still a concern. Bianca is drafting a high level collections profile for the BHL. There will be some mapping to individual libraries. Tom noted it will help us make some decisions about what will and will not be in the BHL. Should applied material be included (agronomy, horticulture etc.)--a concentric circle approach. EOL funding dictates some of this. Tom B. noted that the center circle should be filled in first. This brings us back to a discussion of scanning allocations. Doug noted that the technology available and the data set is not easy to tease apart. Is there a list of the 5000 most important works--can do this in botany based on citations and TL2. As we accumulate new bibliographies in Cite, we should be able to identify important materials. Tom noted that Smithsonian digitized Index Animalium and it is mostly parsed out and trying to see if can derive the most cited journals; also trying to get Zoo Record. OCLC Analysis was not helpful. Collections status document is on the wiki page: Collections+and+Selections

Tom noted that he has received requests for several suggested meeting. He would like to suggest the people prepare a proposal with numbers, who should attend and location, etc. Then we can set priorities. Nancy suggested we need to set the date for the March meeting. Tom will set up a poll for the March meeting. Danianne noted that if there are extra meetings, reports need to be frequent because not everyone will have travel money.

Doug noted that we need more frequent reporting on budgets and expenditures. Tom says he tracks it weekly--what level of detail or format do we need? Tom asked for volunteers for developing reports--Doug, Nancy and Susan volunteered. Tom will contact them.
Action Items: TG will start a weekly report to the IC summarizing developments. TG will schedule the next year’s BHL IC Conference call. TG will prepare a description of BHL meetings/workshops proposed to date for IC review. TG will prepare a BHL calendar of meetings.

4. Technical changes (Chris Freeland): a. Setting up a public-facing wiki in addition to internal wiki. This will enable us to put out technical information and changes to documentation. FAQ, info about BHL, technical documentation. This is not open for public editing.

b. Released a version of Open URL resolver on top of the BHL portal that can send author, vol, issn, isbn etc and can be searched by BHL. New API and machine-way rather than user way to get into BHL.

c. Ingest of data from CDL and IA; we have the technology and can make it happen. Now policy and collection development question. Chris's question--Which contributors do we want to use? 28 libraries have put content into IA. searches--call number ranges and subjects searched frequently in BHL. It is really ingesting content from the Internet Archive. Google content can be excluded if we choose. Elizabeth noted that the ingestion of Field Museum content is still sometimes labeled as UI. Chris noted that this is not the question he was asking. Chris thinks everything that is related to BHL should be brought in. Tom noted that we can add contributors. Cathy asked why we can't attribute content to Internet Archive Library? Tom noted that doesn't fit with how we identify our content. Tom said he and Chris had conversations with CDL about this. It will be no surprise to them when records show up. Should we do the same with UToronto? There are 28 libraries--who will ask all 28. But our MOU with IA says all stuff has creative commons attribution. Graham noted that legally we can use content but courtesy and reputation suggest we should write to the institutions and tell them what we intend to do. Judy noted that we should thank them for their contribution. Nancy and Connie agreed. Tom agreed that we should not ingest Google records for now. Susan agreed--quality poor and missing pages. We don't want our users having to distinguish between Google and our content. Nancy noted that we should not suggest we think Google is a quality project. We have some hard data about the samples of non-Google but not Google. The HATHI trust has Google scans with good metadata. This is in negotiation.

d. Relation of CiteBank and the current BHL Portal. Using the Drupal/Biblio solution as the main point of entry to BHL materials would address many of the search issues that continue to frustrate users. What we've been calling "CiteBank" could become the new home page, user interface & search index for BHL, with the existing BHL portal supplying names indexing and page turning. Lots of tech discussions about using Drupal as front end into all of BHL. The portal will exist (URLS etc. persist). Users do searches and get citations in Drupal and this will include Biosynthesis bibliographies etc. as well as BHL. It seems like the right way to change the BHL interface. Tom noted that with the adoption of the biblio module of Drupal there will be a better search capability. What do we need from Chris to make a decision? Graham suggested a list of benefits and risks for the two options. Chris will send a page for us to look at. Tom B. noted that all of the museum websites at AMNH are moving to Drupal. Susan noted that she knows that MBL is developing a prototype set of repositories that keep content in synch and she wondered if there weren't commercially available large file systems. Chris said they aren't. This is part of the Fedora work. NYT/Google use content delivery networks that deliver files that get most use. We are building redundant repositories. Tom noted that this is part of a wider effort to have BHL content replicated in multiple environments--experimental. We have been invited to participate in DuraCloud and get info about costs and how it will work so we can evaluate if this is a potential partial or complete solution. Currently content only exists at IA and partially at MOBOT--not sustainable. The Smithsonian repository fell through because it was too expensive. Action Item: CF to prepare screen/pages for IC review.

5. Appointment of Deputy Director. (Cathy Norton): Cathy noted that EOL wants to ensure that there is someone to step in if a component leader has to step down. Cathy was appointed but cannot serve any longer. Also, she is vice-chair of the IC. We should look for younger blood. She suggests that we appoint Martin Kalfatovic. Nancy noted that this makes sense. She agrees that Martin is the closest person to step in. Connie noted that Martin is a great choice but wondered if BHL is Smithsonian-heavy. Cathy pointed out that we are lucky to have Smithsonian willing to put so many resources into BHL including staff. Susan noted that Martin is great but that she sees the point in both Connie and Cathy's points. She wonders sometimes if it is really clear that the Smithsonian doesn't employ the Program Director. Doug asked if there is a term-limit. Cathy said we have a responsibility to our funding agencies. Cathy moves that the IC confirms the appointment of Martin Kalfatovic as Deputy Director of the BHL for 2 years as of September 19, 2009. Nancy noted that there is a whole different procedure for hiring a director. This is not a preselect for hiring a new director. Judy seconded. Cathy calls for a vote. Motion passed. Elizabeth said thank you to Cathy for her service and Connie agreed.
6. Susan suggested a new agenda topic--NYBG hosted the QA summit. She was under the impression that these would be presented to IC and discussed but they were just posted--can we review the recommendations. Action Item: TG to send out a link to the QA summit recommendations for discussion at the next conference call.