BHLStaffNotesMay2208

BHL Staff Conference Call
May 22, 2008
10 a.m. (Eastern)

AMNH Tom B., Matthew B.; MoBot Chris F.; Smithosonian Erin R., Keri T., Suzanne P.; Martin K.; NYBot John M.; MCZ Connie, Joe; MBL WHOI Jen Walton, Mathew P., Diane, John F.; NH-London Bernard ; BHL Chris F., Connie, Martin K.

1. Note takers – Suzanne with Joe as back up.

2. Round Robin Updates and Question / Answer Sharing
Welcome Jennifer from Field (sorry about not welcoming her more formally on the last call!)
AMNH: first 10 titles have been scanned. AMNH staff is working with IA to start the workflow process. AMNH plans on starting to send trucks down next week. Ask for suggestions on hiring vendors for delivery. Diane and Joe use William B. Meyer a library moving company – they are based out of CT.
IA has not told AMNH there are any limits to quantity of books they can send to NYPL. The plan is to send as much as possible once a month to spend down the $48,000 BHL allocation. IA is moving the scanning center from the Donnell Branch to the 43rd St. annex the 2nd week in August - will be a larger site with more scanning stations. When they reopen end of August, possibility of being able to do fold outs.

NYBG: – has had some problems with NY IA center. NYBG was asked to limit shipments to only 100 books per week in advance of the scanning center moving, as NYPL is trying to get more scanned before the move and they have taken priority. Communication with IA and NYBot is poor.

MCZ: (Museum of Comparative Zoology) Harvard just got their contract signed. AMNH got the contract signed last week as well.

MoBot: Will be sending titles that they have already scanned to the Monograph Dedupers. NYBot has about 600 titles on the Deduper now. UIUC will be working with MoBot to scan selected material. The plan is to choose things that MoBot wants scanned for BHL and is also owned by UIUC. This will get the material done without shipping etc.

Action Item from Round Robin:
Martin, with his BHL hat on, will tackle the communication issues with IA in NYC– AMNH, NYBG, and IA’s Robert and Stacy. Need a little bit more communication from IA to the individual libraries. Tom G. and Cathy N. have constant conversations with Robert but topics covered are different and information is not being given to the staff that need it.
Staff feel that once the bumps are worked out, the overall process gets much smoother.


BHL Portal – More material has been brought in. The criteria for selection of material from IA has been changed to ingest/import more things. IA’s use of the date field turned out to be very problematic. The backlog of material waiting final quality review from IA was growing very large. A decision was made that if material had page level numbers and was over 45 days old, the material could be brought into BHL with some confidence.

Local catalog discussion – MBL WHOI has started to bring data back into their local catalog. The decision was made to point to both the IA and to the BHL in the bibliographic records for material that they sent to be scanned. They have some of the documenation up on the wiki and are willing to share and talk with other BHL members.
NYBG has done some re-ingest as well and can share code (they are on III). Smithsonian has not done anything yet.
No one has begun to examine using the Monographic Dedupper to identify titles that were removed from the individual library scanning work flow and using that data to pull IA and BHL links to the BHL members scans into the local ILS. An additional use for the de-duper and a concept worth examining.
BHL Portal supplies an RSS feed on titles. NYBG has been using that. Others will be requiring a report with additional data. Bernard reported that the EDIT group will need a lot of information from the BHL and a spread sheet of data would help out.

Action Item:
A separate discussion needs to happen to identify what is required in that report and let Chris know.

3. Serial Mashup status
Bernard reminded us that one of the delays in moving to the next phase of the Serial Mashup was the approaching BHL Europe data. The time for when that data will be coming is not clear and BHL staff are having duplicate bids now. We all seemed to agree (and correct me if I’m wrong – Suz) that we could deal with the duplicates brought by BHL Europe when their data is added, but because of immediate need we’d like to merge the data we have currently in the mashup asap.

Action Item:
Bernard is going to turn on the merging feature soon and let us all know that it is up and running and any hints on how to use it. Keep you eyes and ears open and share with collegues if you discover a good workflow.

4. Monographic DeDuping successes/issues
The Dedupper does exact matching. This means punctuation can cause things to not match – And example would be that Joe’s MCZ records did not match MBL WHOI records because of periods and slashes. John F. reported that development time should be back onto this project in a couple of weeks. This is a mysql database and possibly something can be run to strip punctuations out before the matching. The earlier experiments with the fuzzy matching were not that successful. Keri from the Smithsonian reported that diacritics are difficult as well.

The OCLC number is one of the dedupping features that Smithsonian, NYBot, AMNH, and MBL WHOI are using. MoBot will also be able to supply OCLC numbers when they load the items that they have already scanned.

Action Item:
All need to think and play with the deduper and email John F. with any ideas and concepts of what is needed.

5. Meeting reports and Future stuff

Record information about meetings you are going to on the BHL wiki. When a few of us are together, it would be nice to chat in person. Break bread. Swill some refreshements

SLA – Seattle: Connie is doing a poster. Cathy is on a panel
CBHL – Grand Rapids, MI: Don, Chris Mills (Kew), Susan and Judy (?)
ALA – Anaheim: Martin and Suzanne are presenting
RLG Members – Philadelphia: Martin, Nancy Gwinn, Chris Mills (Kew), - Who from Harvard?
IFLA – Montreal: Connie and Nancy Gwinn are presenting

6. Permissions process

Erin has just put the database up on the wiki: http://www.sil.si.edu/BHL/BHL_permissions.cfm
The database is the first step in getting information that Tom G. had in various formats. We can begin to look and work on some of this material but we need to talk about procedures etc. Right off it was noted that there are some things that BHL members have already scanned or are scanning. Erin will work with a subgroup to review the data and what needs to be added to the database etc. To her knowledge there are only two officially signed agreements. And for one, the Peabody Museum, it wasn’t clear if this was digital files, born digital material or what.

Erin hopes to join the collections BHL email group. Meanwhile, she will post that the database is up to the overall BHL email group.

Suggested items for the database included: grid lines for easier viewing, copyright language to include in Wonderfetch™ , what has already been “bid on”, etc.

Action Items:
Erin will post to the BHL email group that the database is up.

A group will talk/email/whatever about the status of some of the information: Erin, Diane, Matthew P., Joe, Don, Matthew B.


7. BHL Portal Administrative Editing Tools Review

Action Item:
Separate call with possibly WEBEX to be schedule once Chris is ready to roll with last round of feedback.

8. Face to face meeting of us – suggestions

New York was suggested (if we can afford it)
Action Item:
Suzanne will begin to doodle weeks for people to being to think about

9. Collection selection issues (if any)

Connie and Doug – been working. Soon near future. Next call.

10. OCLC numbers for e-version and eISBN assignments status
Tabled

11. Next call scheduling requests

Within two to three weeks – another general call

Special topic calls will happen as needed to include:
BHL Portal reports to members for ILS ingesting
Portal administrative function editing
Serial Mashup next phase merging techniques
Permissions database workflow
Wonderfetch™
NY area workflow with IA etc