bhlstaffcallapr2016

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Lead: Diana Duncan
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.

Attendees (All) - Now you can LIVE TYPE DIRECTLY in the google doc


Agenda

• New to the call? Please introduce yourself and welcome! (Diana Duncan)
• Round Robin Updates - anyone have any news to report? (All)
  • Question from SIL: What are the binding practices at your institutions? We are struggling with Moving Wall requests as our serials are often bound together across publication dates, and a Task Force has been created to discuss the issue. Do you bind your serials? If so, what guidelines do you use / have you had problems with digitization as a result / etc? If not, when did you stop and why? How do you handle Moving Walls? Have you had the case where items you have digitized previously are bound together post-digitization, with a new barcode and all old barcodes removed from your catalog?
    • Response from MBG: Digitize on barcode of full item when you can only digitize one item. For bound-together moving walls, fake barcodes for each item.
    • Response from MCZ: Digitize on barcode of full item for each item (IA allows multiple uses of barcodes - only IA IDs are unique identifiers). Does not use barcodes for statistics, only includes them in IA for ease of searching IA to find an item.
• Initial quick summary of BHL@10 meetings in London (Martin/Carolyn)
• Pan-BHL Scanning Update (Carolyn)
• Committee reports:
  • EC & Members group (Martin Kalfatovic)
  • Technical Team (Joel Richard)
  • Collections Committee (Trish Rose-Sandler)
  • Cataloging (Diana Duncan)
  • Grant projects:
    • Expanding Access - IMLS (Susan Lynch)
    • NDSR grant (Connie/Joe)
• Other topics? (All)

Notes
Anyone new?
No

Round Robin

Question from SIL – Jackie
Moving wall requests and issues with binding practices. Task force created and interested in getting your input--How you’re handling moving walls? Does this impact binding practices at your institutions?
Matt: stopped binding 7 or 8 years ago. Like MCZ, we use Boston scanning center, hasn’t really been a problem haven’t needed partials scans; not doing moving wall titles.
Diana Shih: stopped binding almost 10 years ago and haven’t addressed moving wall issues.
Jackie: For those who stopped binding, was it a policy issue? A funding issue? For AMNH, was mainly budget. At MBLWHOI, combo of budget and number of in-print we are getting
Connie: At MCZ, reduced binding for variety of issues. Not keeping as many print volumes, didn’t feel many needed binding. Plenty of print we are keeping. When services were centralized at Harvard, they just don’t do it and we lost the person who was doing that. We have an endowment for binding, so more logistics.

BHL Joint Meeting Summary - Carolyn
Took place in London at Natural History Museum and Kew, April 12 - 15. The first day was the Global Business Meeting and BHL Day which was open to both BHL partners and invited guests. Programme included guest speakers including from NHM and Rod Page. It was recorded so we’ll look forward to seeing that available soon.
The next day was the Open Partners Meeting at Kew, where Secretariat and Partners reported out on what they’ve been working on since the last meeting. Attendees included Members, Affiliates and Global Partners as well as a handful of invited guests such as Bob Corrigan from EOL, Dmitry Schigel from GBIF, Rod Page, and Alice Lemaire from the Natural History Museum of Paris who expressed interest in learning more about joining BHL. Slides from the presentations will be made available in the coming weeks.
On the 14th, the Members Business Meeting was held at NHM. Key points included revisions to the Bylaws to define that going forward the Global group will operate as a committee which will be called the BHL Global Committee and will have representation from each of our 8 global partners. Elected Anne Lise Fourie from SANBI as the Chair and Ely Wallis will serve as the Secretary.
For the User Feedback group, Bianca, Doug, and Tomoko presented the Working Group’s recommendations. Members’ approved changing the form on the website to help users self-select the type of request. Once implemented, we’ll have a chance to assess and see what new recommendations might be proposed for consideration.
NHM and Kew also offered tours to meeting attendees, including one at Tring for which Grace produced a Periscope. We encountered some connection issues but it was recorded and Grace will make that available on Youtube.

Trish – For the Google Hangout, it’s very difficult to hear Rod’s voice on the recording.

Carolyn – I’ll work with Grace to look into that.

Susan – artworks in BHL? Not discussed.
Connie – documentation not quite complete. Members will discuss later


Pan-BHL Scanning Update: Things are slowly stabilizing and there are still a few things that need to be in place before we are fully set. We have successfully completed the renewal of the BASE agreement, essentially the one upon which all other contracts are dependent. That has enabled us to temporarily continue using our existing contract. However, due to the terms of that contract we can no longer extend it by adding additional funds and must therefore start with a new contract vehicle for any new funds we would like to add.

The process of creating that new contract is still underway and there have been some unanticipated delays so we are about 2 weeks behind where I was hoping we would be. Carolyn contacted FEDLINK to see if we can continue scanning as is through MAY. However, as of this morning, she had not heard back. So there is a possibility that the scanning fund will close at the beginning of May. It would then re-open as soon as that new contract is in place. Carolyn will keep everyone posted. Apologies for any inconvenience and thanks in advance for everyone’s patience.

Technical Update
Joel: Brief update – we’re starting to see some movement from legal department.

Susan at NYBG: numerous partners having trouble with diacritics, Bianca and Susan met with IA engineers and they gave a tool to test Z39.50 interface
NYBG and AMNH – those problems have been solved

Marty: At what point in the process does it get used?

Susan: The purpose of the tool is to make sure control files at IA are set properly based on what is returned by z39.50. So not part of workflow so used to make sure that is set up correctly.

If something is already in IA with problematic diacritics?
Contact Jude
In BHL, probably needs to be done manually
Jackie: I don’t think we’ve detected for every time we’ve had this problem, Is there a way to search for these or form a task force?

Susan: Jude is looking at try to scan IA for diacritics problems. For the most common problems at least, and identify the objects and identifiers in IA. Believe they would give the list of identifiers to Bianca

Diacritics – what changed?
Believe that with NYBG and AMNH was triggered when migrated to a new ILS,
Native UTF-8 vs not

Collections Committee – Trish
Finally wrapped up issue of adding visual resources to BHL
Bianca is in process of sending to EC
Standalone primary works , not those that are already part of books
Task = elucidate issues and options, not necessarily recommendations

In our discussion, standalone representation of 2 dimensional items with relevance to scientific research

Five primary issues, five options with pros and cons
1. Reconfigure data model to accommodate vr
2. Configure vr to data model
3. Incorporate into external image repository like EOL and Flickr and incorporate linkages from BHL
4. Build a brand new repository for BHL for images
5. Or not do this and continue focus on literature

Considerations around collections, metadata, technical development, usability

Connie: It has not yet been submitted to EC. Tried to get away from pros and cons and get towards solutions for resolving those issues

Cataloging Committee – Diana Duncan
We did not have a call this month
Have 11 open issues

EABL - Susan Lynch
Statistics: 701 volumes, 85 titles, 60000+ pages
Permission for 16 in-copyright titles
3 additional titles we expect permission
Design work on enhancements to Macaw for segment definition at time of upload

DPLA Fest
Relevant topics included k-12 primary source sets and teaching guides
Would love to see something like that with BHL content
Archival Description Working Group will issue a white paper some time this summer

Matt – permissions titles – are they currently published serials, or previously?
Some ongoing, some have ceased, not sure of percentage

Other Topics
MCZ rec’d IMLS Laura Bush 21st C grant for NDSR residents for furthering next generation of BHL. There will be 5 fellows working on 5 projects:
1. SIL – usability and user needs
2. Harvard – transcription into production
3. MBG – images
4. Field & Chicago Bot Garden – collection gaps
5. LA – identifying tools of other digital libraries

Marty – a couple of recent presentations on Purposeful Gaming, one at Cornell, talking mainly about crowdsourcing. Also will be giving a talk about PG next week and Seed and Nursery Catalog at a local history society.

Tomoko - LC is interested in hosting a BHL workshop for NC and NY. Also talking to NLM.