bhlstaffcalldec2015
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Staff calls main page
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 - if you are new to the call, please introduce yourself and welcome! (Bianca)
- BHL Staff Meeting Nov 12-13 follow up
- User Feedback Mgmt working group update (Jackie)
- Discovery Tools working group (Diana)
- BHL Move update (Joel)
- Administrative Dashboard to be shut down 1/22 to 2/1
- No ingests from IA weekends of 1/23-24 and 1/30-31
- Technical Advisory Group (TAG) = Technical Advisers: Joel Richard and Susan Lynch (Martin)
- Collections Committee (Bianca)
- BHL Staff calls check in - How are they going? What can be improved? (Bianca)
- Thank you William Ulate! (Martin)
Notes
Attendees:
Grace Costantino (BHL)
Bianca Crowley (BHL)
Diana Duncan (FMNH)
Alison Harding NHM)
Patrick Randall (MCZ)
Joe deVeer (MCZ)
Kelly Haberstroh (USGS)
Susan Lynch (NYBG)
Connie Rinaldo (MCZ)
Carmen Ramirez (CONABIO)
Keri Thompson (SIL)
Martin Kalfatovic (BHL)
Matt Person (MBLWHOI)
David Iggulden (Kew)
Jackie Chapman (SIL)
Diana Shih (AMNH)
Trish Rose-Sandler (MBG)
Mike Lichtenberg (MBG)
William Ulate (MBG)
Randy Smith (MBG)
Marty Schlabach (Cornell)
Matthew Bolin (AMNH)
Richard Hulser (NHMLA)
New Participants
Carmen Ramirez from CONABIO and new BHL Mexico coordinator joining for first time today. Started a month ago. Earlier this month there was a workshop with Martin, Carolyn, and Connie to do training for BHL Mexico folks.
Staff Meeting
- Matt Person gives his reactions to the staff meeting: Matt wrote a blog post after the meeting about the experience. Thought it was a positive experience. Four words that represent meeting:
- Transparency (always been element of BHL since Matt began working on it. As we saw in the meeting, it still is, from things like Martin and William’s updates and explanations of how secretariat work, which provided good review and new information.)
- Inclusion (when there is transparency there is inclusion, and at the meeting everyone could spend time with each other and get a chance to see how things work, and our roles within the A-Z of BHL workflows.)
- Interaction (through these experiences: the ice-breaker, invited dinner at the Pilsk's, lunches, and evening dinners, and breakout/training sessions we all interacted, and got to work with each other and use this as a tool to continue working with each other after the meeting and into the future.)
- Responsibility (we were also given a sense of the responsibilities related to this project, both through numerous explorations of the life cycles of particular tasks, and also through an exploration of what staff responsibilities are relative to those of directors, and what we need to do to give directors better idea of what our needs are.)
Evaluations: Linked into agenda:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RmNY8rIokr11iCjlnH3zyBHQa9DiBu7rSS4mjs0wwGc/edit
- We had a paper form provided to folks at end of meeting – that was put together into this digital version. Row 16 has summaries. Big thing is we need to make sure there’s enough time for all of the topics next time. But based on evaluations, it seems that things went pretty well.
Relevant Action Item Review:
- Using Gemini to add Technical change requests or things you’d like to see improved or changed for BHL. Gemini is a great place to file all of these things away and make sure they don’t get forgotten or lost.
- Diana: Should we fill out one request per topic or several things in one issue?
- Bianca: I recommend that you put your requests in separately. Makes it easier on our end to process these requests.
- Bianca: I encourage everyone to think about one thing you’d like to change in BHL and submit an issue for that in time for our next call in January.
- Joel sent Bianca pointers and tips for how to submit technical change requests and Bianca will share with group. Includes: be as detailed as possible, include screenshots, and include as much information as possible to help replicate the issue you encountered.
- Book of the Month Series:
- BHL User Series
- If you have leads for people for Grace to interview for the BHL and Our Users series, please pass them on to Grace (costantinog@si.edu)
- Listservs:
- Do you know of listservs or venues that we could share BHL to or at? Let Grace know.
- Grace to modify wiki page as place for people to provide ideas about where we can share BHL.
- Submit ideas about listservs or venues to which we could share BHL here: Venues+to+Share+BHL
Lots of notes and action items on the staff meeting page, so be sure to check it out:
BHL+Staff+Mtg+2015
User Feedback Working Group
Jackie: One of the staff meeting action items was to deal with the user feedback management system. No one is currently available to spend a significant amount of time triaging and responding to issues. The User Feedback Working Group is created and has met twice. It includes:
- Bianca
- Matt
- Jackie
- Mai
- JJ Ford
- Diana Duncan
The group is meeting weekly. The plan is to provide a few proposals to the members to decide what the correct level of triage response time is and what the member’s will allow staff to do. Ideas will probably be brought to staff calls to get feedback and provide updates.
One major decision: provided change request in Gemini for how to update auto email sent to users who submit feedback. When they submit feedback they’ll get an email with a link to the help page and a better understanding that we won’t be as responsive as we were in the past.
Bianca is now dealing with immediate issues coming into Gemini for the time being.
Bianca: How can we improve the Gemini system itself to facilitate the process?
- You can now edit issue the description in Gemini. There’s a new button on the right-hand side of an issue that you can use to edit the issue title.
- You can also now email users directly from Gemini. Bianca is using it right now, but it’s still experimental. Very useful for Bianca, and others might find it useful. We’re still not completely sure how it will work out in the long-term, so still experimenting.
Comments:
- Mike: If you send an email from Gemini, who does it look like it’s coming from?
- Bianca: There’s a settings in Gemini once you click on the button to do an email where you can choose “no reply” or the feedback@biodiversitylibrary.org email account. The feedback email is really ideal, and if users respond to the email you send, it will automatically add a comment to the issue for the reply.
- Diana Shih: I think this is a great solution, because I don’t like to reply through AMNH emails.
- Randy: I like it for the convenience.
- Bianca: There are also ways to add canned responses and other best practice things to Gemini to make your life easier. We will look into those in the future.
Discovery Tools Working Group
Diana Duncan: Our group is chaired by Adam Chandler. We’re looking at metadata coming out of BHL that we’re providing to vendors via export and OAI feed. We’re looking at title and article level metadata. We started in March and wanted to finish by the end of this year, but we won’t finish by then so we’ll keep working till end of next quarter and want final decisions made by the member’s meeting.
Some Updates:
- DPLA will be ready to do harvest of BHL data at end of January.
- Still in process of working on a report for KBART (used to provide serials titles and coverages to discovery tools). We don’t have all of the data we need to provide all of that info, so we’re working on report on what we need to do in order to make it happen.
- We’ve finished mapping what article fields we need from what’s in BHL. Smaller group will look into what tag sets we want to include for those.
BHL Move Update
- Administrative Dashboard to be shut down 1/22 to 2/1
- Allows team to spend next week copied all files over and making switch.
- No ingests from IA weekends of 1/23-24 and 1/30-31
Mike: We have all of our servers in place at Smithsonian: file server, application, web, and database servers. We have most of the files copied over: OCR, all files for services and websites. Databases have been created on database server for production but not for beta sites. Nothing configured and tested yet. A lot of configuration details still need to be hammered out so that’s next the task.
Joel Richard has a meeting on Jan 6 with Smithsonian technical review board, so that’s the soft deadline for getting system up and running.
If all goes well expect to go live by February 1st if not before then.
If there are books you want to see in BHL, be mindful of those weekends (1/23-24 and 1/30-31) where we won’t ingest any content, so the books won’t get in.
Mike: if all goes well we’ll ingest the weekend of 1/30, but for now we will assume we won’t till we know for sure.
TAG now = "Technical Team"
Martin:
- First, want to give immense thanks to William for serving as technical director. He will leave that position at end of this month but will remain at MBG for position with World Flora Online after this period.
- Our interim solution for managing technical team will be that we will continue to have weekly technical team calls on Mondays. Joel Richard and Susan Lynch will be joining those call plus Martin and Trish as well as Bianca. If you have any questions about technical things, this team will manage that, so you can contact them.
Jackie: Earlier you were talking about adding feedback to Gemini regarding BHL 2.0. Who should we assign that to?
Bianca: I will work with the tech team to decide who to assign it to. Right now, those issues are getting the tech feedback category and Joel and William have reviewed the current list and come up with a process to deal with them. So for now don’t assign to anyone and let Bianca triage once she knows.
Collections Committee
Bianca: BHL has a collections committee that meets regularly, twice a month. We handle a variety of issues related to collections management and cataloging issues. There is also a dedicated cataloging group if anyone’s interested in joining that.
Committee made big decisions on last call:
- We will be updating collection development policy to state that we will no longer accept external links into BHL (metadata only items or titles in our collection that link out to content on third-party websites). Content that we already have that links out will remain.
- Keri: Do we know how many of those links we have in BHL?
- Bianca: We do know, and I have those numbers. I will provide them in our notes. Mike provided them.
- Mike: You say we’re not taking anymore. Should we halt the OAI harvests we’re doing now bringing in links from RJB and SciELO?.
- Martin: We will continue to harvest those we were taking before but no new data providers will be available.
- Keri: Is there a list of the providers we currently accept?
- Bianca: Yes, I will put that data somewhere, perhaps external links wiki page with stats and who the providers are and who we will continue to harvest via OAI.
- Marty: Can you share rationale for this?
- Martin: Primarily we don’t currently have staffing to do analysis and data mapping for new providers of content. Trish used to do this, and just workload around profiles to do this is problematic. Still lots of concerns about concept of external links, so right now we will stop third party links and have time to evaluate the value of having external links through third party providers.
- For current external links, we would like to de-emphasize those in search results. Default search results are relevancy ranked and these externally linked resources would automatically fall at bottom of relevancy ranked list.
- Committee decided to eliminate externally linked content that is duplicated in BHL. We don’t have resources to do concerted effort to identify them, but as we find them, we will be removing external link and making sure it redirects to content in BHL.
- We will be changing default language in user interface for clarity’s sake. For monographs lacking volume information, current language is “no volume description.” This will be updated to “volume details” and “view book” will be updated to “view volume.”
- There are Gemini issues in the system for these for Mike to take care of when he has time.
BHL Staff Calls
Bianca: I want to take stock to see how staff calls are going and how we can improve them. There’s an anonymous poll in the agenda.
Thoughts about what we can improve going forward?
- Diana Duncan: I like committee updates rather than round robin unless there’s a particular issue at an institution that we need to discuss.
- Jackie: I completely agree. We covered so much in this meeting without having round robin. We also have updates at the bottom of the wiki from ANSP. In future we could use this model if people have updates and we could discuss if we really need to but otherwise just have updates for reading.
- Diana Shih: Is there a way to have video staff calls?
- Bianca: Maybe.
- Bianca: Is anyone else interested in leading staff calls, maybe as a one-off thing?
- Matt Person: That used to be done years ago, when we were just starting out. Since you’re the person who leads the calls, do you have any ideas about what could make it easier or improvements?
- Bianca: No, I think I’m too deep in the process and I need to hear from you all about what you want to do. I’ve gotten into a routine with these calls and I need your feedback to improve that routine.
- Marty: I wonder if there would be merit in each of us signing in on agenda page as attendees, making it easier for all of us to know who’s on any given call, rather than Bianca having to take roll. Especially when we’re new, it would be helpful to folks to see the names.
- Jackie: I’d like to second that – names and institutional abbreviations would be great.
- input received via email to Bianca: Possibly reduce the number of calls – Could they be scheduled every other month or every 6 weeks?
- input received via email to Bianca: The round robin takes up a good part of the call time. Could it be replaced by a 10-15 minute open discussion at the end of the call so that there’s enough time for the agenda items? During this time, people could report on new or special activities or topics that aren’t on the agenda. Since it’s difficult to manage who speaks next on a conference call, perhaps you could ask people to email ahead of the call if they have something specific to discuss.
No one said calls are not useful. Most say useful, then neutral, then very useful.
Give Bianca ideas for future staff calls. She wants to make them as useful as possible for everyone. It’s more participatory for everyone without round robin.
ANSP Update (in absentia)
The big update for ANSP is that we have the first ANSP in-house scan uploaded to BHL! The scan is found here:
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/110129#/summary
We are getting ready to send another shipment to SIL for scanning and we are finishing up a second in-house scan for upload. So that’s it for ANSP updates.
