bhlstaffcallaug2015
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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
- Wiki color change! Oops? (Bianca)
- I would like to add link to our help page in the wiki header (gray banner at top) - would this be helpful?
- Round Robin (all):
- Bianca don't forget BHL Move and Discovery Tools
- Gemini (Jackie)
- There are now 1601 open issues in Gemini!!! We've broken 1600..... :(
- 1601 open issues is an all time high, breaking our record from June of 1550 open issues!
- That's 63 more open issues than during our July call
- 111 issues have been created since our July call, 92 of which are still open.
- For comparison, we received 77 issues for our June call, 189 for our May call
- Please check your Gemini queues for issues with the "Reference" component. BHL does not have full time reference staff, and depends on all BHL Gemini participants to help answer user queries as assigned.
- There are currently 66 open issues in Gemini with the "Reference" component.
- If you have responded to the user, please remove this component from the issue so that we have an accurate count of outstanding reference queries. And of course, after any tasks have been taken care of, please close!
- FYI Documentation review and update (Bianca + Secretariat)
- Pagination Article Start/Stop (Bianca)
- Next Campaign: Fossils! (Grace)
- Book of the Month Sign-Up! (Grace) https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/133jIWeKKmCssk8y6zyphexhY89SQaKKXM_ywrDzouzY/edit?usp=sharing
- Tech Updates (Trish and William)
Notes
Attending
Bianca, Carolyn, Grace, Joe DeVeer (MCZ), Diana Shih (AMNH), Randy Smith (MBG), Cathy (ANSP), Jackie Chapman (SIL), Matt Person (MBL), Diana Duncan (Field), Joel Richard (SIL), Keri Thompson (SIL), JJ and Keiko (Harvard Botany), Leora Siegel (Chicago), Don Wheeler (NYBG), Alison Harding (NHM), Trish, Mike and William (MBG), Marty Schlabach (Cornell), Martin Kalfatovic (SIL), Daria (SIL)
Wiki Changes
Thank You, Keri! Beautiful new colors
Upcoming, Bianca would like to add a link in banner, to go directly to help and documentation page. Would this be useful?
Two yeses.
Diana – I think it’s fine the way it is. People might then want other categories there. As long is it visible on left when first open the wiki.
Marty – visibility depends on what screen you open on
Does the Help page apply to all Staff? Yes
We’ll come back to this for further discussion at another time
Round Robin
Joe (MCZ) – Tabletop scribe arrived this week. Started to install yesterday and decided to relocate. May be set up by end of next week. Arrived in very sturdy crate. Otherwise, pretty much status quo. Shipment still out at IA and another one ready to go when previous one returned.
Diana (AMNH) – Everything is fine. Slowing down with volunteers away. Continue to do QA and scanning through IA. Waiting for next round of funding to send new shipment.
Randy (MBG) – Pretty much status quo. Scanning and working on Gemini issues, cleaning up metadata, e.g., copyright metadata, volume, year
Cathy (ANSP) – everything pretty much status quo. Waiting on last shipment to be sent back. Have another ready to go. In-house scanning with Macaw in the plans for near future
Jackie (SIL) – Status quo, scanning mostly permissions items. Regular workflow for folio and rare items going through Macaw
Matt (MBLWHOI) – doing some work in Gemini as time permits, and the periodic twitter and Facebook posts
Diana (Field) – same as usual. Picked up and dropped off a shipment on Monday. Had some digitization quality issues, because someone new with IA was doing digitization and didn't seem to understand procedure. So hopefully they will work that out for the next shipment. Volunteer still paginating.
Joel (SIL) – BHL Move. Closer to getting database server. Migration will be November at this rate. Passwords changed with BHL Admin, so good to go with moving BHL db when SIL is ready.
JJ and Keiko (Harvard Botany) – Update similar to Joe’s. Shipment at IA. Got a grant for stereo slides, and glass-plate negatives to eventually go into BHL.
Leora (Chicago Botanic Garden) – Trying over next month or two to get all of our digitized items in Illinois site into BHL via Macaw, as appropriate. Funding from State of Illinois, imaged notebooks. Hopefully a big push through September. Requested funding for a tabletop scribe for 2016.
Don (NYBG) – things quiet here. Shipment at IA. Prepping another shipment for when funding is ready. Haven't been active in Macaw lately.
Alison (NHM) – Tabletop can only scan materials under size of Scribe (up to A4 paper size). A run of journals has gone up so seems to be working alright. IA Wellcome Institute scanning tech helped with setup. Have PT technician working on table-top for now.
IA also offered support to Harvard as well, phone or email whenever needed.
Marty (Cornell) – Focusing on Purposeful Gaming and scanning seed & nursery catalogs. Preparing 7th shipment to vendor. Have been using Macaw for processing when come back from scanning vendor. Last week there was a 3 day outdoor Agricultural Show. Mann Library usually has a table and this year we introduced people to online games, and bookmarks we made for Purposeful Gaming. Hard to get people engaged in playing game at table of event but it did help to spread the word. Will bring samples of swag to the Staff Meeting in November.
Discovery Tools Working Group
Finished with BHL MODS to DPLA mapping
It took a good number of calls with a number of folks involved
Next call we’ll be taking a look at sample of the mapping to see how it looks
Hopefully ready for next DPLA harvest in October
Next focus is mapping to KBART for discovery tools
Using WebEx from Cornell which has been helpful for screensharing
In case of DPLA, had to look at requirements in detail to see what they need from BHL to appear the way it should in DPLA. They had originally taken BHL data from DC feed which isn’t as robust as OAI feed. So improving. Goal is for old records to be replaces as part of next harvest.
DPLA does a complete reload with every harvest so everything will be updated.
Martin – Nancy and Connie and some global partners at IFLA
Gemini Update
1601 Open issues in Gemini – 63 more open than at last call
Seeing trend of getting more and more issues into Gemini, summers are generally off season with push during school year so it will be interesting to see what Gemini numbers will be in Fall if trend continues!
66 open with reference issues
Please take a look at those and respond if possible, or re-assign.
Documentation
Secretariat has been updating the BHL documentation. All of which is available on the Help page of private wiki. Working on re-organizing that page.
Very helpful to have all in one place.
Can’t see scrollbar for embedded Google doc. So can’t view all
Ctrl F can pull up sections not viewable but still not seeing whole document
Google doc scrollbar is sometimes not visible and other times not obvious. So a usability issue with embedding in this page.
Joel is going to trying something that might fix this. Make frame really, really tall. -- Yes FIXED by maxing out frame, thanks!
Bianca thinking about turning this into something with table of contents. Long term thinking of eliminating embedded.
Topic for Staff Meeting
May be differences in browsers to consider as well
Pagination
Eliminating article start/stop as page type?
Diana – think it could be eliminated
Joe – agree. Could be a timesaver for those doing pagination
Bianca will leave it open for comment for a little longer before making the final decision
Next Campaign – Fossils!
October 13 – 15, 2015
Oct 14 is National Fossil Day
Across social media platforms + 4 live webcasts at partner institutions
Please feel free to suggest resources to Grace in spreadsheet (above in agenda, or email Grace). Especially interested in Paleo Botany
Book of the Month
Next week have one from NHM-London
Hopefully BHL Australia next month
October and November are open
Tech Updates
Trish
Art of Life - Final Report submitted to NEH. Feel free to send questions/ comments to Trish. Science Gossip still 5500 volunteers participating, probably uploading content in next few weeks. Over 17 media outlets have covered
Purposeful Gaming – working on blog posts, in terms of coverage, number of players. Planning to reach out to folks in gaming community
William
Mining Biodiversity – after launch of MyTweeps and AltMetric. Looking to implement Disqus tool for discussion on objects. Intern in Canada to implement before code is frozen to move to SI. So far we’ve had good results. Only issue is number of times we hit Disqus is limited. Seeing if we can raise bar or optimize number of hits.
Also group on OCR correction experimenting on algorithm, previous one was not better than one we have. So looking at PG results to compare results of processes. Tagging relationships within corpus of BHL to train algorithms to extract and mark entities and relationships.
Issues with servers over last month have been resolved. Temporary issue with collection in IA are resolved. Things are looking good on our end for process of moving to SI.
