bhlstaffcallapr2017
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Staff calls main page
Dial from U.S.: 1-877-860-3058
Dial from outside U.S.: link to international conference lines
Passcode 961479
Lead: Bianca Crowley
Notetaker: Matt Person
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) -
TYPE DIRECTLY in the google doc
Agenda
- Reminder: Toggle Mute/Unmute using *6
- New to the call? Please introduce yourself and welcome! (Bianca Crowley)
- Outreach update (Grace)
Round Robin Updates / Open Discussion (All)
- News to report? Questions/Comments?
- follow up from IA PDF quality issues http://biodiversitylibrary.countersoft.net/workspace/0/item/59128
- Cornell, AMNH, and MCZ items with poor quality PDFs improved using "betterpdf" method
- documentation: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1L_e0pUrYx8S9bVoZs-yQpEIMSAT9PC40ygCZw5MkSA4/edit?usp=sharing
- IA reports: poor quality PDFs can be the result of "image heavy or having fancy text blocks is more what I mean. The detection of what is text and what is background leads to pixelation. This could also result from less than focused JP2s...Most of the time, books with image plates don't have issues with blurry text. On the off-chance the PDF compression isn't great, illustrations embedded in text or non-standard text blocks tend to be involved." Book/item size is not the issue.
Grant Projects:
- Expanding Access - IMLS (Patrick Randall/Mariah Lewis)
- DPLA new and improved harvest (Susan Lynch)
- NDSR grant (Connie Rinaldo/Joe deVeer)
Committee reports:
- EC & Members group (EC or Member volunteer to report?)
- Technical Team (Joel Richard)
- "Copy specific information" field updated for IA PMA and Macaw (Bianca and Joel)
- alphanumeric numbering of pages in Macaw (Joel)
- Collections Committee (Bianca Crowley)
- Cataloging (Diana D.) "We mostly discussed a plan for fixing the records with diacritics issues. We also came up with standards for metadata in BHL creator records, for which I will be creating documentation."
Misc:
- User feedback management aka "Gemini" (Bianca)
- Documentation FYI (BHL "Help" wiki docs updated periodically) (Bianca)
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Meeting Notes: (please edit notes as necessary)
Notes/April 20
11:00am Good morning Americas! /Good afternoon UK!
Bianca greeting: “welcome BHL Mexico”
New to the call? Please introduce yourself and welcome! (Bianca Crowley)
(No new introductions.)
- Outreach updates from
Grace : Please see the Quarterly newsletter/subscribe link/pressroom, public wiki for old newsletters:
Grace mentioned BHL will have a booth at the Earth Optimism summit this weekend in DC, a 3 day event science/conservation public event. BHL will be highlighted at the “innovation commons” event Smithsonian/Library of Congress will co-staff booth.
2 New BHL posters will be shown at booth, feel free to use, see below:
- New Posters
- Grace’s reminder:
Know that Outreach materials are available to you on the
Promotional Materials page: this includes ready made presentations, and templates for powerpoints and posters, flyer, brochure, banner,
- New BHL Store Collections via Café Press – proceeds to pan-BHL scanning. Kudos to Grace’s intern Carolina for developing these products:
- Reminder: Please check out the monthly outreach highlights which Carolyn Sheffield writes – please look at stats posted as well - for more great monthly updates!
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Round Robin Updates / Open Discussion (All)
- Mai Reitmeyer of AMNH – Gemini login issues with Gemini/Chrome “insecure login notice” – is the issue/ Joel of SIL said: looks like a Countersoft issue.
- Matt Person of MBLWHOI – fyi- BHL is now included in the SFX link resolver, for us, meaning that when this service is turned on, our serials A-Z list will have close to 93,000 BHL titles included for the public to access. Will report back on how this new feature works out.
- Diane Rielinger of Harvard Botany – table top scribe question …she described issue of having to flatten pages during table top scanning process. Diane will contact IA about this - and will try other techniques, Bianca suggests that Diane pose question to BHL staff listserv.
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Follow up on IA PDF quality issues:
-Mai AMNH and
Michael Cook of Cornell have done follow up on this , and
Bianca has pulled together below documentation for people to look at – taking questions and comments on this.
Mai says that biggest issues are with Field Notebooks…generally they might rescan to generate better PDFs for Field Notebooks, other issues will be on a case by case basis.
Michael says – what’s curious about the issue is referring to a
very small book scanned in house, people noticed the quality was not up to par, MC says that they had not raised the DPI for this small book – which may be what’s behind this issue. Bianca says this issue should be in BHL digitial imaging specs.
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Grant Projects updates :
- Expanding Access - IMLS (Patrick Randall/Mariah Lewis)
Patrick – 4853… vols 518… titles 149… in-copyright titles…Mariah will be working on developing video tutorials, Patrick will be at a conference (?) tomorrow
DPLA new and improved harvest of BHL content (Susan Lynch)
Susan of NYBG: EABL is handling DPLA ingest of BHL content into DPLA dp.la . Last harvest was 2 years ago. At that time Adam Chandler remapped BHL to DPLA, which allowed re-harvesting by DPLA of BHL. Re-harvest was completed April 11. If you go to DPLA and search on your library – you will see this content. Harvesting will be done every 2 months. Susan thinks mapping and display is very good – problems, please let Susan and Trish Rose Sandler of MOBOT know if you come across issues/have comments. Comment: Michael C of Cornell: It looks fantastic/great !
Bianca: kudos to Susan, Trish, and Mike Lichtenberg
- NDSR grant (Connie Rinaldo/Joe deVeer)
Richard Hulser of NHMLAC speaking on
NSDR: All the Residents are at the DPLA meeting today.
Residents will be in DC at NSDR symposium next week ! All are doing a great job!
Adrianna can’t give field notebook update today as she is at DPLA as well
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BHL Committee reports:
- EC & Members group (EC or Member volunteer to report?)
Bianca: Staff, Please note link above for all pertinent info on the Annual Meeting
Michael Cook commenting on the Annual Meeeting: Annual meeting went swimmingly – please see the blog post above – among highlights: Nation Library Board tours, art installations. Most interesting thing was BHL open day symposium. Prof Peter Ng , taxonomist, made suggestion on clear path to high resolution images. Michael also spoke of Dr. Lim from Malaysia: spoke of mistakes in literature…Linneas issues – main point Bianca said Martin said: we do not alter BHL content.
Votes taken for BHL Annual Meeting 2018 in Los Angeles, new slate elected, Singapore hosts did great job.
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- Technical Team update (Joel Richard)
- "Copy specific information" field updated for IA PMA and Macaw (Bianca and Joel) Bianca - has updated metadata documentation information. This refers to specific item information you wish to share with people. Brevity is stressed in guidelines.
- alphanumeric numbering of pages in Macaw (Joel) -
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- Collections Committee (Bianca Crowley)
- Good discussions, working with NSDR member Alicia Esquivel, in assessment of our corpus.
- Also Pam at SIL, helped with collections and contributor browse page improvements
- Marisa – working on best practices in digital libraries
- Worked with external partner Organization for Tropical Studies – metadata issues and copyright status issues have been noticed – so content from this organization has been removed.
- Redaction issues: with field notebooks
Any questions? – Richard Hulser: expecting field notebooks redactions in the future. Bianca, interesting that after 11 years this has come up just now for the first time. Richard – mentioned oral histories have these issues. Monica from Mexico is interested in contributing to the redaction issues/ Collections Committee in the future.
- Cataloging Group (Diana D. not on call today) "We mostly discussed a plan for fixing the records with diacritics issues. (Susan Lynch had noticed this isse quite sometime ago – problem started in 2015, resolved in 2016, problem has been resolved, though 230 title records will need to be edited)
We also came up with standards for metadata in BHL creator records, for which I will be creating documentation." – Diana Duncan
Misc:
- User feedback management aka "Gemini" (Bianca)
Gemini status: fine. Still looking for volunteers for Bianca’s coming 10 week maternity absence. Need assistance for 4 hours per week
186 issues generated last month.
105 issues closed.
Please see help wiki, for issues which come up:
Shout out to Diane Rielinger for documentation updates .
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