bhlstaffcallapr2014

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Dial 1-877-860-3058 and enter the passcode 961479

Lead: Bianca Crowley
Notetaker: Carolyn Sheffield

Charge: Biodiversity Heritage Library Staff share the collaborative responsibility for the daily operation, improvement, and promotion of the BHL as related to the mission and goals of the Library and its participating institutions. Staff participate in project communications, including monthly conference calls, BHL's issue tracking system, and various outreach and engagement activities. Staff are responsible for the digitization, discoverability and maintenance of content contributed to the BHL repository by its participating institutions.

Agenda:

• Roll call & introductions (Bianca) - New to the BHL staff calls? Please introduce yourself
• BHL Members Meeting recap (Carolyn)
• BHL Tech Meeting recap (William, &co)
  The BHL Technical Advisory Group met at the Missouri Botanical Garden on April 2 and 3.
  Among the Attendees were members of the TAG (Keri Thompson, Joel Richard, John Mignault, Siang Hock Kia, Chris Freeland (one day), the Secretariat (Carolyn Sheffield & Martin Kalfatovic), the Tech Team (Trish Rose-Sandler, Mike Lichtenberg and William Ulate) and on the Phone were: Joe De Veer(TAG), Bianca Crowley(Secretariat) and Connie Rinaldo(EC).
  
  The group met to review BHL technical development priorities, staffing and communication concerns and other related topics. We went through the core BHL technical functions list, including server and website maintenance for biodiversitylibrary.org. Also, we discussed about the impact of the three grant-funded projects to enhance BHL in which the Tech Team is involved and the outcomes expected from each. We commented on how these projects came to support the Tech Team staff after the McArthur funding ceased and how we expect them to contribute in supporting our Tech Staff until the end of 2015.
  We also touched on the user feedback that relates to technical issues as suggested improvements to BHL functionality, and recognized the limited resources we have to dedicate to all these activities and therefore, the importance of a well thought prioritization of activities, a clear communication of planning and progress and the involvement and support that the TAG, the Secretariat Staff and the Executive Committee could contribute with, in particular, to the Tech Team and, in general, to the whole BHL project.
  
  Several Action Items were stated, particular some important preparatory ones for May 1st. to propose implementation plans and schedules for several of the prioritized activities. The full list and the notes can be found on the BHL Tech meeting link above.
  
  
• Scanlist discussion update (Bianca) - Our serial scanlist is sorely out of date now that we have 19 BHL participants. How do we coordinate serial scanning going forward? Bianca to follow up with group selected from last call: Joe, John, Jackie, and to request a UIUC rep
• Feedback/Issue Tracking system updates (Jackie) - Portal Editing Queue = Status: Unassigned and Component: Portal Edit and/or Pagination (depending on what kind of work you are willing to take on)
• Round Robin updates (all)

April 17, 2014

Attending
Bianca Crowley, Daria Wingreen-Mason, Carolyn Sheffield, Matthew Bolin, Connie Rinaldo, Trish Rose-Sandler and Mike Lichtenberg, Jackie Chapman, Diana Duncan, Richard Hulser, John Mignault, JJ Ford, Becky and Diane, Diana Shih, William Ulate, Cathy Buckwalter, Randy, Matt Person, Keri Thompson, Don Wheeler, Marty Schlabach, Joe DeVeer, Tomoko Steen

Action Items
Connie will send out reminder to the Strategic Planning group that formed at the BHL Members’ Meeting
William will update the link to the projects’ impacts document on the wiki
Bianca will send out updated collection development policy with recommendations re rescanning and 3rd party links to the group when ready.

Introductions:
Diane will be taking over for Becky. She has been with California Academy on and off since 1988. She has a degree in biology and holds an MFA in Illus. BHL’s access to images is very appealing. Diane is also a reference librarian, does collection development, and also the manager & will be the official PI for the IMLS grant for micro-residencies for artists at Academy.

Members Meeting Recap (Carolyn)
The annual Member’s Meeting took place in March in New York
Two day meeting:
First day brought together reps from BHL Members and Affiliates institutions, including from our newest participating libraries, and was great opportunity for everyone to meet face-to-face and get to know each other and the organization a little better.

The day was comprised of reports from the Program Director, Program Manager, and Technical Director. Slides from all of those are available on slideshare and linked from wiki. Lots of great information on where BHL is today, information on some of the big grant projects that the Tech Team is working on. I provided an update on where we’re at in terms of social media and usage, especially with some of the staff changes that have occurred over the last year and how that has impacted our numbers. One thing that I highlighted in my talk was Gemini status.

Many thanks to all of you who have been going in and closing or reassigning your tickets, and of course to Jackie for her monthly reminders, The gap between opened and closed tickets has been steadily narrowing. Down from 19% in Oct of 2012 to 2% at the beginning of this year. Of course, there is still work to do as last I checked there were about 1000 tickets still open.

So, thank you to all of you for your work on that, and let’s keep up the great work and if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact Jackie or Bianca.

Second day was business meeting for Member institutions. Review and approval of bylaws, BHL dues budget for CY2014, including $30,000 for pan-BHL scanning. They also touched on some fundraising and development ideas and there was a bit of discussion about how to coordinate grant funding across all of the participating libraries. Not only do we want to make sure that we’re not competing with each other for the same grants, but we also want to make sure that going forward any new grants will not be drawing down on BHL resources without approval from the Members. So the group decided that from here on out any new grant proposals must be presented to the Members for approval prior to submission to the funding agency. I included that as an update in the Monthly reminders that I sent out at the beginning of the month and will continue to send that out as a reminder.

They also discussed strategic planning and formed a strategic planning committee with the goal of defining Objectives for each of the goals within the strategic plan. As part of that, they mentioned that they will be revisiting the input that was provided when the goal statements were being created.

Minutes from the business meeting are now up on wiki at 2014.+BHL+Members+Meeting .

Connie – will send out reminder to the Strategic Planning group

Tech Meeting Recap (William)
MOBOT, Apr 2-3
Attending: Keri, Joel, John, Siang-Hock, Chris, Martin & Carolyn, + Tech Team, Joe, Bianca, Connie on phone.
Reviewed tech dev priorities, and staffing and communication concerns
Core BHL technical functions, including server and website maintenance, and daily work of portal.
Also impact of grant funded projects and expected outcomes
How those came about to support the Tech Team staff
User feedback, lots of requests, some relate to innovations and tech improvements.
Limited resources to devote to all of these activities. Discussed prioritization of activities. More how to solve. Action Items by certain dates.
Minutes are on wiki so you can check those to see what we’re working on
Very productive in identifying what we need to work on as priorities

Marty: were tasks prioritized?
William: we looked at the tech priorities that Members discussed at Members Meeting and will have monthly meetings with TAG to review those priorities. Schedule of activities will also be shared monthly.
Connie: Very useful to hear everything that is going on. One thing is that list of tech priorities is a bit long for the level of staffing that we have.
Bianca – impact of grant funded projects, link on wiki needs to be updated
William will update the link

Bid List (Bianca)
Designed to avoid duplication of serials scanning
Scan list of participating institutions is out of date
UIUC, how could they get started, how best to communicate about what’s being scanned
How to communicate all going forward
One suggestion – use issue tracking system
BC will follow up on hammering out details on how to move forward
Joe, John and Jackie’s help, and will add UIUC to help with that discussion
Anybody else interested in being involved:
Richard: For Affiliates, how do we fit into that whole process?
Cathy: Do you want us to continue to use it?
BC: Details remain to be seen but definitely welcome Affiliate participation in issue tracking. Continue to use in meantime.
Cathy: BC provided instruction and we put in whatever we have in the queue
Matt: You can add me to the list.

Feedback / Issue tracking updates (Jackie)
No update on name of how we refer to issue tracking. Continue sending suggestions Jackie’s way
Had 64 issues since last call, many from recent PDF issues
Diana Shih, tackled portal editing queue, thank you!
Portal editing queue is under all of our issues, unassigned, portal edit, pagination. Only 21 in now, so chipping away. For example, pagination or re-sequencing. Affiliates, even if not scanning, this is a great way to be involved.
Harvard closing issues and reassigning. Thank you both.
Upgrade, probably June. More training then.

Round Robin (all)
BHL Scanning budget update (Carolyn) Current balance on pan-BHL is $2,700. Current balance expires July 2014. Next Dues amount to be added for pan-BHL = $30,000. Date for adding new Dues funds = TBD. Jackie/Bianca hope to coordinate Issue Tracking system upgrade with next release of funding.

AMNH: sent shipment last week, approx. 65 items. Quick turnaround on last one

Smithsonian: returned shipments from ANSP and Field. Having trouble identifying new items from general scanning. Feel free to reassign or new assign to us. Fedex workflow solution for Affiliates when absolutely necessary, if no other Member library holds, we’ll call on Affiliates to scan and they ship via Fedex to SIL for scanning. It’s an intense workload, incl 100% QA’d. Scanned at SI, in-house.

Field: just got shipment back. Volunteer paginating.

NYBG: No change from last time. John working with Macaw, still reviewing. Some snags but should be ok now. We got shipment back from IA, paginating. Putting together another shipment

NHM-LAC: Budget mode. Going through rare book collection, donations. Afterwards, will look at listing and see if any matches. Putting links to BHL in catalog. Sent proposal to Internet Librarian International – London, October. If accepted, feel free to, Mid-October. Great opp to hear about BHL some more. Any of you who would be interested in representing BHL, RH will keep us updated. Archives now reports to Richard, too.

Harvard Bot: Business as usual. Post processing most recent shipment. Experimenting with Macaw. Probably will ingest about 100 items over next couple of months. Grace says hello!

MCZ: Shipments together with HUHBOT. Getting another one ready to send. In house scanning, getting another batch together for that as well. Working on our end of Purposeful Gaming. Trialing transcription tools. ALA volunteer portal. Probably in addition to From The Page

Connie: Don and I worked on some language for collection development policy re: third party links and will send to everybody. For linking out pieces and the rescanning questions. Bianca will send out updated collection development policy to the group when ready.

Tech Team: Trish, Mike, William – Purposeful Gaming. Working on RFP to gaming companies. NYBG and MOBOT and Harvard and scanning hort catalogs
Art of Life. 2 of 3 servers set up to run algorithms across full corpus. Begun classifying images with Macaw tool. Mining Biodiversity – partners from London got starting date, end of April start of May. Jen Hammock, looking at what we want to discover. Requirements, a bit later, but we will be asking for your input.

CAS: Rescans coming back from IA. Bids in pan-BHL for small number of items. We’ll discuss if going forward. Probably not going to get to Gemini issues. Heather Yeager will take over Connecting Content. Last staff call.

MBG: Engelmann wrapping up. Progressing with book scanning. Will be getting back to copyright soon. Basically for some reason a lot of the scans at MBG have defaulted to one © or another. We do not put in what it is when we upload. Mike has sent a spreadsheet and now I'm putting together what everything should be marked as.

ANSP: Going pretty good. Shipped out a new shipment. Going through Gemini.

MBLWHOI: Working on Gemini.

Cornell: Scanning, 130 volumes out now. Participated in PG, scanning seed and nursery catalogs. Will be at CBHL later this month.

LC: Digitizing from general collection, only to end of September. So working on figuring out budget for this year. Georgetown, starting a new program, biodiversity and human health. Looking at whole picture. Maybe Becky can use to find a way to come back!

Kew (update via email): massive changes taking place at Kew...currently waiting to hear if we will still have roles in the new structure and in the library should know by the end of this month...