BHLSTAFFCall100308

October 3rd
9:00 Central/ 10:00 Eastern/ 14:00 GMT (I think)
Notes Pre Meeting: Tom Garnett will be joining at about 10:10. Erin Rushing will not be on the call. Please let her know directly if there are any copyright agreement questions. Or we can hold off for another call. Bernard will not be able to join the call. His notes have been incorporated below

Attending: Kevin Noland (NYBG), Chris F. (BHL, MoBot), Martin (SIL), Doug H. (MoBot), Joe DeVeer (Harvard), Connie (Harvard), Don W. (NYBG), Diane (MBLWHOI), Matthew (MBLWHOI), Jen (MBLWHOI), John (MBLWHOI), John (NYBG), Keri (SIL), Suzanne (SIL), Matthew (AMNH); Tom Garnet (BHL for part of the call)

Suzanne will be taking notes and Diane will review

• Welcome old friends, meet new ones, status of BHL partners and members of our call
  • Jen Warwick has left the Field Museum and Diana Duncan has joined our BHL group list
  • Kevin Noland is new Digital Project Manager at NYBG. Duties include the day to day work of scanning, supervising on scanning technicians on sight and some work on the BHL project.

Round robin updates

• NH London
  • a. Gemma is the new Nathan and has been trained up and the handover was smooth.
  • b. The IA also has a Scribe in the National Library of Scotland (non-BHL)
  • c. We have a fulltime post (until March 09) to perform due diligence checks on post 1860 Serials, so any priorities should be fed through to us now.
    • What is the procedures?
  • d. SFX (part of the Vital project under EDIT) is nearly ready for release and has some BHL titles in it. Hoping to learn more at Woods Hole about how we improve this.
    • Chris knows enough more later
• NYBOT
  • This week is the last shipment before the NYPL center closes. Jersey center is supposedly accepting shipments October 20th. General feeling is that that date is overly optimistic.
  • There is serious concern over the loading dock (handicap lift) at the new location in Jersey: NYBot’s custom carts may not fit.
  • Material flow has slowed down but pretty much running smoothly.
  • NYBG still doesn’t have wonderfetch. NY asked for two weeks a while back and still not ready. Martin needs to bring this up with IA.
• Harvard/MCZ
  • Plugging along. One shipment every 2 and ½ weeks. One reason for the slowing down because MCZ has lost some student help.
  • Copyright renewal 1923 to 1964 project includes working with Sue Kriegsman at Harvard to get titles cleared for copyright.
    • Harvard has joined the OCLC research copyright database project. Titles that have not been renewed are being reviewed. Sue is point person at Harvard and MCZ is working on identifying titles.
    • Michigan IMLS reported to be part of OCLC project also as are other large institution collections and it does have a tie in with Stanford database.
  • MCZ is testing boutique scanning imaging at Widner Library. Specifically MCZ Memoirs with huge foldouts. Widner scanning costs 25 dollars per fold out. <Yikkeees!>
  • Part of this workflow still needs to be worked out, specifically - the metadata from Hollis to BHL.
  • Concern: Latest shipment from MCZ included titles that have been cleared regarding copyright – IA didn’t have copyright information in the data. IA had Wonderfetch before. Joe will be contacting them asap to find out what is going on with that. Everyone keep an eye out for proper data showing.
  • Joe will double check that the Wonderfetch url had the blank space in the "not in copyright" placement (%20%).
  • Reports are coming in from various places about problems with sloppily packed returned shipments. MCZ did have some damage from one book from special collections. Joe talked directly with Paul at the Boston center. Now returned materials are shrink wrapped and packing added to make the items snug on the shelves of the carts. There has not been a repeat problems.
• AMNH
  • With the NYPL center moving soon, AMNH just sent the last shipment.
  • The focus has been on ornithological serials and other vertebrates as outlined in the wiki spread sheet. The goal for the next 10 weeks is three carts to meet quota of money allocated.
  • AMNH has had a few problems with books being sent back in not too good condition. They worked directly with IA and it all seems to be resolved. AMNH gave IA some supplies to help with the shipment.
  • AMNH has been taking pictures to document conditions of materials. AMNH had to redo binding and retipped some pages after two shelves spilled in shipment back that were not shrink wrapped. NYBG carts got water damage. There has been some rejects of material that is unclear if the spine broke in attempting to scan. When should IA notify aabout created damage? When does IA reject? They sent back books that had damaged, claimed they were rejected but were they really scanned anyway?
  • Very disappointed to find that IA sent books that did not belong to AMNH. Reported that is happened at NYBG. NYU got a AMNH book. FEDScan had a similar problem reported where a test run of another federal agency book was reshelved at LC.

ACTION ITEM: Everyone needs to document to insure that information gets to Tom G, Graham H., and Cathy N. who have regular calls with Robert Miller of IA. John M. has created a page on the wiki to place a central documentation. IA+Issues

• Smithsonian
  • Shipping about 200 pieces every week. Got a shipment back that had problems including: bad cropping and missing pages and books not scanned at all. Misapplied metadata. LC was seeing worse problems. Robert Miller stopped the scanning and came out to assess FedScan. Smithsonian did not send anything for two weeks. Next shipment will only be rescans of problems.
  • LC (and Smithsonian agrees) feels the weak link in the metadata assignment is the little pieces of paper. Staffing is inconsistent. NYBG had it happen this last shipment.
  • Smithsonian will be doing 100% QC for next shipment or two.
  • Keri, Grace and Suzanne met with Robert and Ronnie (IA) at LC along with Aaron (LC). We are sorry to report that there were no real changes outlined by Robert. Workflow still makes us feel we need to do review. NYBG reports that they feel they have better service and trust Kirtas.
  • FedScan is not doing foldouts. LC did test of the foldout machine and it did not meet the minimum. LC is working with IA to figure out how to reach proper status. Effective 72 ppi. NYBG stopped foldouts. IA is 2 dollars a foldout.
• MoBot
  • 1 mill pages almost. Sheet feeding. Scanning includes post-1923 titles that approval was granted.
  • Streamlined process so scanning numbers should go up.
• MBL
  • Brown had some problems with damaged books but it is unclear where the problems were stemming from – shipping or handling?
  • MBL is sending foldout. Jpegs looked good
  • Stats: 7,000 titles, 3 million pages 5,000 staff hours
  • Shipments are 6 to 8 carts every 5 to 6 weeks.
  • They are working through their monograph collection of post 1923 and working on the copyright “due diligence” work. Serials still have a ways to go
• Bibliographies as a source of scanning selection:
  • Diane has set up on the wiki a spread sheet of a Decapod bibliography. MBL is going through look for serials they own to process. The bibliography is a mix of monographs and serials.

ACTION ITEM: If you monographic dedup or bid on a serial that is on the decapod bibliography, please let Diane know and she will update the spreadsheet. Comments on the list welcome.

Upcoming meeting November 5,6,7 Woods Hole, Mass.

• Bernard from NH London will be attending
• Tom Garnett reported that the next fact to face meeting of BHL Staff will be at workshop in Woods Hole. The focus is on workflow, dedupping, and related metadata issues.

• Plan on arriving the 5th and starting work on the 6th. The meeting is planned to end earlish on the 7th to allow people to travel home that afternoon/evening.

• Travel is easy via Bus service from Logan.

• Diane will be handling registration information for the housing on MBL Campus.

• Chris is the lead on the workshop with John M. assistance. Different sections will have different assigned leaders.

• Invitations will be going out on Monday. Harvard Botany Judy can’t come but Gretchen Wade might be going. AMNH Matthew B. will be attending not sure about Tom B..

Is NY scanning moving?

• What's with New Jersey? IA asked for shipments to be sent October 20th. The NY BHL members are not sure they will meet that deadline. There are already known problem with carts fitting on the lift at the new site. IA has asked for the older, smaller carts. Arrangements are being made for a site visit first from John and Susan. Still need to work out the shipping. AMNH facilities department had no issue going to the NYPL. Jersey potentially is a different issue. By the way, there are tolls.
• What's with Princeton, New Jersey? No one knew.

Updates to the Deduper

• People using it successfully?
  • NH London: We are not using the mono dedup tool yet although we have found some of our serials are actually monos (long story).
• John put some stuff on the wiki about the updates to the DeDuper: new server so the data is backed up; updated framework, and added some new developments and functions. Standardized column headers are now there to help with loads and the speed of the system. A new feature is the ability to upload list, find duplicates, and delete on the tool. Then you can download the updated picklist. Stripping out punctuation in titles helps with the cleaner matching.
• More discussion on what we want next at the November meeting. BHL portal and Deduper workflow. Information of other members scans ingested into local systems. Others? Add to the November agenda building wiki page.
• Joe is manually putting in OCLC numbers because the Harvard ILS report does not include the OCLC number. John did not trust the matching only on the titles though it is a lot better now that they are stripping out punctuation. OCLC number is still the best. The matching system does not do relevance ranking of matches.
• Suggests for improvements? Ingesting directly from the portal? Get dupes that you didn’t scan into ILS? Check off rejects in mass? Pushing URLs? Seems still a lot to doubles. Deduping as streamlined as possible. Return to Dedupper to report rejected material from scanning workflow.

Wonderfetch

• Is Everyone OK with wonderfetch?
• NY is not wonderfetching yet. NYBG is ready to go but IA is not ready.

ACTION ITEM: Martin will get Wonderfetch working in NY


Serial issues are a big topic

• We will try to schedule a serial only call.
• Review Bernard’s message about using the mash up and procedures. Basic bidding processes, merging titles and the workflow to get this done. Joe and Matt talk regularly and maybe informal communication is best or possibly some other way to communicate when working in the bid list.
• Serious issues surround abbreviated titles, simple titles (Bulletin. Proceedings), the various ways to handle title changes with either multiple records or single records and how to merge these.
• The process of recording the rejected volumes from the scanning workflow to alter the bid

Action Item: Suzanne contacts Bernard for scheduling a Serial Only Call
Action Item: Suzanne starts a doodle for next call before we head to Woods Hole.

The Call was ended here on the agenda.
Still open for discussion includes the following topics


Duplicates, Frankenserial runs, Communication (Oh My!)

• Serial Mashup - bidding- mergers - partials - etc.
  • NH London: We have found a black hole with serials bidding at NHM which we are filling in. Hopefully this will reduce dup scanning.
• How does one let others know that you have completed what you are able scan out of a bid you've made, etc.?
• How long does it take to merge a set of serials? 5min. _20 min. ___60min.
• Any feedback on merging/bidding on serials mashup welcome. Send comments to Bernard and/or the group.

BHL Delivery

• I went to a restaurant and ordered the "Archiv fur Naturgeschichte"; the waiter said to me "I'm sorry, but 3 other customers have just ordered the "Archive fur Naturgeschichte", and we only have one of those left...we could split it into 3 portions...or 2 portions, or maybe it will all go to you...how do we figure this out and have everyone pleased with the result?

Teaching Suzanne how to tell time

• Who is going to hold her hand when American's changes the clocks?