BHLstaff2012Notes

Back to BHL Staff & Technical Meeting

Action Items

Day 1

BHL Staff Meeting notes Thursday morning -Matt Person

1- Connie Rinaldo, Welcomes everyone to Harvard 9:02
2- Martin Kalfatovic- thanks to Connie and Harvard

Martin: Project and program update

A. Lots of changes

1. why BHL?– returning to the Darwin slide…

Recent Changes:
a. Mention of Tom Garnett as first director now retired
b. Chris Freeland to Washington university
c. Farewell and thanks to Tom Garnett, Cathy Norton Graham Higley
d. New Chair is Nancy Gwinn, Connie Rinaldo is vice chair Susan Fraser is secretary

PAUSE led to:

Introductions round robin:
Bianca Crowley- SIL, Gilbert Borrego-SIL, Joe deVeer – MCZ
Becky Morin- Cal academy, Keri Thompson SIL, William Ulate, newTech Dir- MOBOT, Mike Lichtenberg-MOBOT, Chris Freeland – Washington U, John Mignault NYBG, Joel Richard,-SIL JJ Ford – SIL, Matt Bolin AMNH, Marty Schlabach - Cornell, Connie Rinaldo MCZ, Trish-Rose Sandler MOBOT, Francis Webb-Cornell, Alison Hardin NHM, David Iggulden, Kew , Don Wheeler NYBG, Jenna Nolt USGS, Matt Person MBLWHOI, Christine Giannoni- Field, Nancy Gwinn, director SIL, Chris Cardin – Metadata MCZ, Mike Blomberg - MOBOT, Imagin Lab coordinator, Grace Costantino -SIL, Clare Flemming ANSP, Martin Kalfatovic, Program director SIL

2. Governance explanations

• Executive Committee
• Steering committee - institutions which have made annual $10,000 contribution
• Larger nstitutional council of 14 institutions (?)

Secretariat at SIL is the: Program Director (Martin), Program Manager Grace at SIL, and Collections Coordinator Bianca

Technical group at MOBOT :Technical Director Wiliam Ulate, Programmer- Mike Lichtenberg, Data Analyst Trish Rose-Sandler at MOBOT

Sources of Funding - Where money goes is allocated by Executive Committee (?)

a. Steering committee dues and donations
b. Macarthur Foundation
c. Moore Foundation, Nation Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities
d. Donations
e. other small grants
f. member subvention – in kind contributions as staff time from scanning institutions
g. Smithsonian federal funds


Some stats:

• There are 16.2 FTE’s working on BHL
• 40 million pages scanned
• 108,000 titles
• IA scanning locations: DC, BOS, San Francisco, NJ, IN, London,…and others
• BHL Global stats – people access BHL from 233 countries
• Mention of Kudos from around the world.

Mention of Global activities – mention of Berlin BHL-E meeting in Spring 2012, celebrating goals and wrap up of active work.

Mention of formation of BHLGlobal Steering Committee

• Chair Elly Wallis –Museum Victoria- Australia
• Vice chair-Henning Scholz- Museum für Naturkunde Berlin
• Secretary-Nancy Gwinn – Director of Smithsonian Institution Libraries

Mention of formation of African BHL component

• JRS fund has provided initial foundation funding
• There was a meeting in June 2012 in Cape Town, when a coordination committee was appointed:

Anne -Lise Fourie, and Ashah Owano

• Plan for Spring 2013 to announce BHL formation Africa

Mention of social media efforts:
iTunes University, flickr, over 2.5 million views,

Mention of new BHL user interface…Simon, and Mike to work on in next months
Changing HEROs – animals/plants of new BHL homepage
-book viewer changes coming- new design

Mention of other outreaches…
Buttons ALA EOL , Seattle winter ALA

Martin sums up, with – Charles Davies Sherborne slide …Any well appointed library must have...library…

Question- Where are donations coming from? a society, people from all over, 20-50-100 dollar donationsdollars

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BHL Staff listserv / calls

-Bianca spoke about BHL staff listserv – please check list in your pack
-Speaks of how listserv is used – mention of staff calls,
-Mention of general BHL listserv through AMNH
-Reminder – staff call Nov

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William Ulate, BHL Technical Director

Spoke of merging BHL US/UK and BHL AU
Called: BHL AUSome!

Mention of last year’s BHL AU website – spoke of US AU website usability

• -Test result:
• Key differences, 17 results, usabilty test report
• Mention of graphic nature of AU site…with comments on less of functionality,
• us-uk added functionality, less graphic.
• Usability COMMENTS INFORMED CHANGES ON BHL US/UK SITE

Other changes - future article data model changes
More article information

Advantages: AU and US share IDs, model has been kept synchronized

• Redesign timeline
• Design phase -Aug,
• Comment and response phase aug-sept,
• Final design –sept end,
• Simon Sherrin to St Louis Oct.1-22, new design implementation–by the end of the year

-Articles, chapters, plates, and so on
-Part of design phase was asking for comments from BHL community
-Working on relations between links and functions
-Coming up soon- the new interface.

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Citebank integration to BHL
Citebank will have the role of global biodiversity citation repository

• Will be open environment
• Will contain aggregated bibliographies
• Was going to be drupal…but this was insufficient for mass of data
• Where are we
• Extend BHL data model
• Trish – functional requirements for a data repository Simon-Mike
• Expanding linking out functions
• Name finding and identification indexing
• Citation reconciliation
• Augment APIs

Art of Life Grant - NEH

What is the project?: Data mining and crowdsourcing the identification and description of natural history illustrations from the BHL

• extract via algorithm
• define metadata schema
• build software tools to auto identify illustrations
• enhance existing tool for sorting, viewing
• integrate with flicker Wikimedia etc
• goals extract-classify-describe-share of illustrations

question about timetable of new website: 1 move to betasite, and migrate to live site
Martin: speaks of promotion and announcement process…

Martin’s, spreadsheets review of session

Explanation of financial in-kind spreadsheet

• Explanation of staff costs, subvention costs, grants,
• Direct staff contributions
• From the large to the small libraries, costs broken down specifically for all types of jobs
• Where did money come from per library? Eg: special funding, grants, awards, internal, external
• Be aggressive in relation to how your time has been spent, in relation to filling out in-kind forms

Explanation of $90,000 in dues, discussion of how allocation decisions are made

1- discussed at March meeting
2- secretariat support SIL takes care of this
3- tech dev team – MOBOT took care of this ( shortfall in salaries –take care of tech staff through Dec. 2013)
4- pan institutional bhl activity – push money back into scanning activity
5- 10,000 to scanning – using central contract with IA…as opposed to individual contracts
6- Maintainence costs related to IA contract overhead
7- $1500 set aside for meetings and travel (this meeting was $15,000)
8- 2000- outreach, printing, buttons
9- Gemini tool cost
10- Money for persistent identifiers
11- Contingency fund $10,000
12- 25,000 technical other costs MBL – EOL, look at other storage options, long term if MBL is not permanent
BHL Dues and Donations - BHL Dues and Donations Spending Plan.pdf
2012 BHL Member Contributions.xlsx

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Question - Trish - How do we grow membership… Connie, Judy, and Doug
USGS, joined National Agriculture Library , LA County Museum,


How will money be allocated – we want to get more bang for our buck with reference to limited funds

…Collections Committee, BIANCA SPEAKING OF Collections Committee methodology, prioritization of Gemini issues, issues not always taken care of- to be presented and discussed Friday. Prioritization methods.

$30,000 Mac Arthur carry-over money.

Pagination, Presentations Updates

Grace –
1- Speaking of manual pagination…please look at shows pagination statistics page on wiki
2- Please look at and use BHL calendar – conferences spreadsheet use the : use this form to enter events on calendar
3- Bianca – mention of AMNH opening up roosevelt rotunda…Itunes U Roosevelt collection
4- BHL presentations page, calendar view is now a google doc. Please fill out form for inclusion
5- Point is there’s just one page for this now.
6- When you submit a paper, form can be used.

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Growing BHL Content

11am

IA Scanning
Fedscan contract can be used centrally
Free to do your own contracting with IA if you have your own funding
Directly scanning w/ IA using own contract
using central contract
Scribe machine


MOBOT Botanicus Scanning is another method for getting materials into BHL

Getting in-house scanned materials into BHL

The "orange bag" problem ==> Macaw as solution at SI
In the coming weeks we will try to do a survey of what content you have
Trying to set up a Macaw server at SIL for virtual use by other BHL member libraries, e.g. Macaw

USGS and Macaw
found developer to donate some of his time to get instance of Macaw up
100 books up successfully
definitely had to do a lot of reconfiguring
adapt to USGS unique needs
active role in future developments

Things can go live via Macaw immediately -- need to be in touch with Mike L. and Joel
As we expand to other instances we need to be in close communications

USGS & SIL
NHM status: Macaw is loaded but still waiting for IT support to set up uploading and communication w/ catalog
BHL AU update: interface redone, was tied to SIL workflow, better viewing of inprogress items, Joe in Adelade training folks, web based uploader, PDF functionality!, pretty close, JR to review changes before releasing to everyone else, hoping in the next month to release updates
NYBG is big target for next installation for Macaw
MCZ is on track for loading
short term solution: loading stuff on harddrives w/ appropriate metadata & image files to 2nd instance at Macaw at SIL, need to have a body sit down and paginate content before it can be loaded
ultimate goal is to have a virtualized version - Macaw in the cloud
what is the timeline for virtualization of Macaw? on wishlist but need hands to work on this...John?

What do you all have?
MCZ: a lot of special collections - 200 items sitting on drives
concentrating on special collections scanning, entirely in house pretty 300 to go
8 items sent to SIL
field notebooks for later...

Cal Acad
very little, there was some rare book digitization a few years ago 3-10 major rare book items, 1st ed. Catesby, Pamona Lindenensis

Records important - book like

SIL: 20ish things as orange bag - upon further review decided to rescan 8 - most of them have gone through Macaw into IA but not all done quite yet

MBG: Phytoneuron articles lately - PDFs blown out into separate images Botanicus workflow

NYBG: a lot of stuff - ongoing project w/ Mellon LAPI, now GPI, scanning in-house and outsourcing for Kirtas intent to make material available into BHL - ending 4th year - 700 items total for GPI in the past 4 years - year 5 starts at end of this month - goes into JSTOR plants, uploading all material in Content DM mertzdigital.nybg.org, also tons of stuff in here as well just hired new scanning person NEH grant for nursery seed catalogs w/ intention of going into BHL but workflow complications; scan all to minimally corrected TIFF, all stored behind NYBG firewall, JSTOR = jpegs and
postage stamps in BHL? field notebooks, NYBG publications in Mertz digital; Britain archives; small grants NY state floras, local floras nationally, NY landscape
[ ]Bianca follow up w/ NYBG folks!

AMNH: have Dspace portal, human brain, archives, museum publications and manuscripts, scanning NH magazine post copyright - contributed by NY Toronto so far but AMNH has additional volumes to contribute; series of museum publications science guide publications, besides NH has been integrated but....
[ ]Bianca to follow up w/ AMNH

Cornell: 2 groups of materials 200 vols. of Ent content 140 titles targeted out of million book project that are NH related; already things in existing collections that might be able to share at some point

NHM: special collections, rare books (folios), a lot of art work, field notebooks

[ ]Collections group: Would be good to discuss scope

Kew: mainly archival material, also GPI Director's correspondence, not sure about scope, rare books digitization done for specific clients

HUH: everything done in BHL via send to MOBOT - not anything else in Harvard system, fieldnotes

ANSP: 20K digital images, virtually no cover-to-cover materials ready to go

USGS: everything we can get up we are trying to get in, but just Jenna

MBL: not much scanning outside of BHL, do have digital herbarium as ongoing project 1000 images if this type of content

Field: nothing

Think about what your capacity is for getting content to an IA facility

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GRACE:

BHL Program Management Overview

1- overview of Grace’s position
2- reporting BHL, EOL, grants reporting, statisitcs: digitization, website, monthly reporting
3- financial administration of grants
4- pay all BHL invoices
5- pan-bhl scanning funds administrator

Executive support
User outreach – non-scanning requests
Coordinate improvement of user tutorials
Outreach and communication

BHL donation campaigns - looking into monetization of social media activities
Increase BHL exposure

Social media campaigns

• Increase BHL presence at conferences
• Quarterly newsletter- blog
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Flickr
• 
  
• BHL calendar
• Press releases

Action item- Think about local conferences for promotion of BHL

BHL Program Management Overview.pptx

BHL Awareness Program: Requirements Brainstorm

What sort of content, resources do we need

1- powerpoints
2- “greatest hits” of slides
3- “this is what Smithsonian Lib” is won an Emmy
4- becky-matt tools for users to interact with to see more BHL features
5- Judy- data mining
6- Don- education tools
7- Mention of brochures and cards
8- Christine - BHL roadshow idea
9- Mention of slideshare group
10- Mention of figshare
11- Papers – link to publisher
12- Question of adding BHL content into places like EBSCO
13- Becky – draw attention post 1923 ?
14- Permissions collection – Binca points out permissions page
15- Blog brainstorming Friday
16- Martin suggests staff does legwork for permissions process.

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Mission Discussion

Facilitator: Grace
Recorders: JJ, Gilbert
Participation "rewarder": Bianca.

Grace: Introduction to Mission workshop. Purpose of the workshop: to help inform the EC about staff priorities for the mission statement and will help them to craft a final mission statement by the time the new UI comes out:

1) Mad Lib/Ice Breaker,

2) Defining the three elements that a Mission statement contains:
-Who we serve (our audience)
-What we do (our “business”)
-What we value (our values)

3) Workshop part: 8 minutes "shout-out-loud" brainstorming of key words for each element of the mission statement.

To see the tallied results of the mission workshop, please link to the Google doc here.

4) Staff vote, each staff member voted on their top three choices for each category and submitted to Grace. The results will be discussed in October on the next staff call.

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Goals Discussion

(Note Taker: Trish)
Goals – will drive our activities
Currently 7 goals from Strategic Plan done in 2009. Themes of goals? still relevant? What is missing?
1)Establish major corpus of digitized biodiversity pubs on the web
Digitizing, establishing what the corpus of biodiversity should be, aggregation
How do we preserve someone else’s content? What do we commit to – preserving metadata? Preserving content files? Keep publications in there since that’s the bulk of what we do.
2) Improve access to accurate, documented information about the worlds’ biodiversity
Access is in the mission statement so maybe focus on services e.g. Rod Page’s ability to mine our content and use in BioStor. Access is making content freely available. Discovery is building services around content. [Enabling discovery both by building services and allowing others to build services around BHL content.]
Community vetted bibliographies (still include? was originally nod to CItebank) – maybe not include as part of goals.
250 yrs appropriate? Doesn’t belong there anymore
3) Improve the efficiency of biological research for users –
Still need to mention EOL? Probably not but Integrating with other projects is important - where does it fit?
Efficiency of - streamlining the access
4) Preserve the textual record of biodiversity for the future – what do we mean by preservation? Is digitization preservation? Should we have a goal to be a trusted digital repository? Yes
Archival, viable. Recommend we remove the word “textual” we shouldn’t limit ourselves to this.
Social practices? Should Crowdsourcing included here? Open source? Getting buyin from others that they own the resource – shared ownership/shared responsibility
5) Sustain the project into the future - could mean multiple things: financial sustainability, sustain staff/participation, technological longevity, long-term access to content
6) Ensure BHL is widely known, understood and used by scientists and gen public
Usability, importance of documentation, education, user instruction. Public is the important group here; multiple audiences. Outreach, communication
7) Internationalize the BHL – 2 themes in one goal, includes collaborating but also encompasses international literature
Trying to tie together species identifications that are made in different cultures and different perspectives, integration of world scientific communities

Overall Themes (didn’t finish Had to leave to go to my presentation in tech group)
Int collaboration & Int corpus
Equitable access

For a summary of themes that were teased out during the Goals Workshop, please link to the google doc here.

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Day 2

Collections & (C) Topics

BHLmtg2012collectionsTopics.pdf
(Notetaker - Mike B.)

Connecting Content (Becky)
IMLS grant project involving 6 institutions (SIL, Cal Academy, NYBG, MBG, the Harvards)
Currently includes 728,000 pages in 144 items (also includes related specimen imaging)
There is a need to collate them through a collection

Letters/Field Notes
Intern: Kendra Hay working on "name enhancement" - She identifies names and then checks with Namebank to verify

There is an extension through March 2014
Done with field book scanning, almost done with specimen imaging

Scope (Bianca)
The core of BHL is book-like objects... Should BHL expand beyond??
Might be best to wait until core is safe before expanding to other formats
One of the biggest services: taxonomical search

Metadata Inconsistencies (Bianca)
Need diligence in making sure copyright information is correct (Call/email Bianca with questions)
BHL is approximately 98% accurate with in-copyright material as well as due diligence material
Public WIKI Copyright page: Move "Note" at the bottom to the top of the page
Not in copyright metadata - JJ, Connie, & Don will work on issues

Art Of Life (NEH) grant (Trish)
It is a grant to identify illustrations in BHL
Push the illustrations to other portals (such as Flickr)
Flickr copyright doesn't have a public domain option
Currently assinging Creative Commons to BHL images
Should BHL's license on Flickr be updated to a commercial one? (Decision needed)
Wikimedia copyright uses date as well as country of publication
260 field - Date is fine, but country is missing (country is in fixed field - 08)
Photographs are problematic
No copyright statement would help facilitate

• Find a set with no problems

Collections Committee Updates (Bianca)
Digitization Project Nomination Form
ID targeted digitization projects that could serve as potential funding opportunities
Seed catalogs can be used as a guinea pig
iTunesU (Gilbert)
Approximately 34,000 downloads in 11 collections since January
Next collection will be released in November: Bone Wars (rivalry between two paleontologists)
Apple recommends creating courses - link with 3rd parties
Microfiche/Microform
BHL ingested over 500 titles from canadiana.org
How many microfiche are in BHL?
Look for uniqueness, OCLC has different records for different formats

Current Scanning Prioritization (Bianca)
Permissions titles
Botanica & zoological priority titles
Scan requests from users (go to the back of the line)
Titles marked in Gemini

Prioritization Strategies Collection
Matt - Selects what needs to be prioritized
Don - Geographic priority for field
Martin - People requests certain collections, entered into Gemini
Becky - Analyze interlibrary loan request to see what people need
JJ/MCZ - Survey the staff
Look at lending stats vs. borrowing stats
Collection analysis pilot
Questions asked
2255 titles with 9583 keywords
Data dump from BHL with "natural history" as subject keyword
Collection analysis approaches
Subject & call number analysis

Blog Types (Grace)
Book of the Week
Updates
BHL users
BHL staffers

Blogging Brainstorming

Blog Brainstorming Session.pptx

BHL Projects and Initiatives Discussion

(Trish Rose-Sandler, notetaker)
Intro to BHL projects & initiatives
Baby steps to achieve a workplan
High impact/low impact
Easy to do/Hard to do
Start with full sweep of BHL projects
Put together a deduplicated list from 7 different sources ( Life & Lit, Tech priorities, EOL reports, etc)
Grouped similar items together in MindMeister, Dream is to have a single list to reference so we all know where we’re going
Could we use Bianca’s new list could be the master list?
Need to structure list so that we know who works on what
Categorize then link out to it so other folks can add to it- Static list won’t get used and valued.
Could also create a timeline for priorities
Is wiki the best place to maintain list? If it stays in wiki it could link to Gemini. (project management task) Could we use the project management software? JJ said Trello is a good open source option

Stakeholders – who can impact this list? Funders, Users (all audiences), staff, Partners, Member Institutions, 3rd party developers, BHL Leadership, Potential Members, Media Orgs, Data Consumer, Internet Archive, Dreamers, Other Digital Projects (Europeana, DPLA), Global Partners, Google, Wikipedia, Wikimedia
How to work our way through list of 84 items?
Identify as
A- Active
BA- Becoming active
IA- inactive
1)Implement mirror site of BHL collection in IA – BA
Technical and admin components
Priority - critical (core function)

BHL Projects & Initiatives List


Life and &Literature List - List of 29 inactive tasks
develop priority based on Hi Impact/Low Impact
Good to consider - Does it belong on BHL’s workplan for next 1-2 yrs?
1) Improve general search (keyword searching and fuzzy matching) Complete for now. It can always be improved but not a priority for next 1-2 yrs
2) Collaborate with partners that have digitized content that we can ingest into BHL – hi impact
3) Include more gov and univ collections (this goes with above) – hi impact
4) Harmonize BHL portals – low impact
5) Allow ft searching/searching in the book – high impact
6) Pursue partnerships with collaborators that generate funding opportunities- high impact
7) Provide better linkages between EOL and BHL –
8) Allow common name searches – low impact (need to rely on 3rd party interpreters to deal with taxonomic issues)
9) Partner with groups doing citizen science activies – no
10) Provide multi-lingual access – no
11) Create focus groups with …educational community – no
12) Improve automated pagination – low impact
13) Collaborate with more educational communities- no
14) Connect to other dbs outside BHL- parking lot
15) Partner with more publishers for current material – high impact
16) Increase manual pagination – no
17) Partner with or build upon ideas of Mendeley – low impact
18) Explore k-12 programming using BHL
19) Global BHL – new UI will work with iPad but not in 1-2 yrs
20) Allow upload of community bibliographies – users could build bibliographies together - we won’t focus on – parking lot – needs more clarification
21) Mobile BHL – priority funding opportunities
22) Support user-created collections and community building – Mendeley does this
23) Enable safe harbor model – no
24) Develop more donation strategies (more tools) – facebook, kickstarter?
25) Include more juvenile materials – no
26) Computable text package – low impact
27) Increase bandwidth (access speed) – no we can’t control because we serve from IA
28) Add GIS component – priority funding
29) Increase print on demand for BHL content -

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BHL Projects and Initiatives Discussion & Voting Session, Part II

(Workshop: Plotting Projects on Impact Chart)

Intro: Bianca
Exercise Facilitator: Grace
Note-taker: JJ

A) Intro to exercise – Grace explains that we are to vote on the impact off Projects and Initiatives taken from Life and Lit.

B) The outcome of this session will result in adding items to the 1-2 year BHL project work plan.

C) Session resulted in 5 Categories into which Projects and Initiatives were placed:
(1) High Impact: items to be added to the current work plan
(2) Low Impact: items to be added to the workplan but, deemed less important
(3) Priority Funding Opportunities- Inactive Projects: projects that we cannot pursue right now but, if we get funding could become active
(4) Table / Completely off the BHL work plan: projects that we will not pursue in the next 1-2 years.
(5) Parking Lot / Clarification: Items that warrant further discussion before they are categorized.

D) Outcome of Group Vote (45 min discussion):

(1) High Impact
-Include more government & university collections.
-Collaborate with partners that already have existing digitized literature that we can ingest into BHL. (related to above)
-Allow for full-text searching within the book
-Pursue potential partnerships with collaborators that generate funding opportunities
- Partner with more publishers for current material
- Develop more donation strategies (more donation tools e.g. kickstarter type sites)

(2) Low Impact
-Allow common name searching
-Improve automated pagination for BHL content using algorithms
-Partner with or build upon ideas of Mendeley
-Generate a computable text package (i.e. for data mining by a scholarly audience)

(3) Priority Funding Opportunities- Inactive Projects
- Bucket: K-12 educational opportunities (3 items below)

• Create focus groups with intermediaries to identify ways to improve BHL for educational community
• Explore K-12 science and art programming using BHL content
• Collaborate with more educational communities

- Support user-created collections and community building
- Provide multilingual access (Tech team mentioned an easy software fix for this but, will require $$$)
- Pursue and generate BHL-games (gaming with a purpose, i.e. create games that improve BHL content)
-Partner with organizations and groups that encourage citizen science activities such as Project Noah (http://www.projectnoah.org/)
- Generate mobile BHL presence BHL (stay optimized for tablets big discussion about mobile presence because of new developing countries)
- Allow common name searching
Add GIS component
- Allow annotations and mark-up
-Allow local serving of BHL data on a general user’s computer (i.e. BHL in a Box)
-Increase manual pagination for BHL content

(4) Table / Completely off the BHL work plan:
-Harmonize portals
-Provide better linkages between BHL and EOL; (stay out of taxonomic battles)
-Enable “Safe Harbor” model
-Increase bandwidth (limited by IA)
-Include more juvenile materials

(5) Parking Lot / Clarification:
-Increase print-on-demand opportunities for BHL content (Marty: Cornell makes -quite a bit of revenue off of this effort)
-Connect to other databases outside BHL
-Allow upload of community vetted bibliographies (Part of the Global Names Project already? Perhaps active,)