bhlstaffcallfeb2016
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Dial 1-877-860-3058 and enter the passcode 961479
Lead: Randy Smith
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! (Randy)
- Round Robin Updates - anyone have any news to report? (All)
- Committee reports:
- EC & Members group (Martin)
- Technical Team (Joel Richard)
- The dates of the Admin Dash shutdown are on hold, pending completion of the legal team's review of the site. The shutdown will likely occur a day or two after the review is complete.
- Collections Committee (Connie Rinaldo)
- Discovery Tools (Adam Chandler or Diana Duncan or Suzanne Pilsk)
- User Feedback Management (Jackie Chapman)
- Cataloging (Diana Shih)
- Grant projects:
- Expanding Access - IMLS (Susan Lynch)
NOTES
Committee Reports
Meeting Planning for Members’ Meeting in April (Martin)
There will be a business portion of that meeting
If there are specific issues that you would like to be discussed
New Affiliates (Martin)
Naturalis, Internet Archive, and MBLWHOI Library are as BHL's newest Affiliates
Technical Team Update (Joel)
Joel has heard back from the SI legal dept but nothing final yet. It is being reviewed and Joel hopes to hear back in a few days. Joel will be away but checking email. Once finalized, we’ll send out an exact schedule for turning off admin dash. Please note that you might just have a few days notice before it is turned off so please plan accordingly for any big projects that you may have in the works.
Collections Committee (Connie)
Several members of EABL have joined the committee including Mariah Lewis, Susan Lynch, and Patrick Randall.
Focus has been on adding Artworks in BHL – can we and should we accomplish? We're putting together a proposal for the EC to pass on the Members. Considerations include costs, interface changes, etc
Most people saw 'Contributing Library' changed to 'Contributors'
Many new contributors will be coming in as part of EABL
Later this year, the Committee will also be reviewing IA ingest criteria and make sure its meeting our needs
Discovery Tools (Suzanne)
Adam and Diana are not available today.
Group is winding down. We've been outlining what we could do , what we need to do, should do tomap BHL data to other services such as DPLA discovery layer solutions like WorldCat
Next steps for Discovery Tools group: create appropriate Gemini tickets so that the tech group and others that need to weigh in on policy decisions or tasks are alerted to the issue and assigned as needed. Suzanne took first attempt at creating tickets but more work to be done. Group will meet again to talk about next steps re: policy vs next steps that don’t need policy change/review.
Adam Chandler not in Gemini; nominate that he should be added.
The staff group may need to weigh in on some of the Gemini issues once they’re added. Some tickets would involve big changes to our data and structure, so they might be nixed.
Randy: Is this about creating more access to metadata that we have or adding new metadata?
Suzanne: Some is about cleaning up our data for consistency. Others about possibly adding services that can automate our data fields/make certain fields mandatory in the future.
Parsing it apart, cleaning up for consistency. If we don’t have it, we were taking it off table. In future, we might require creation of some data
Some services required data to be in a specific format. Volume issues, date
Will there be ways to automatically or semi automatically correct inconsistencies across libraries?
We’re putting in Gemini tickets to identify these kinds of things
User Feedback (Jackie)
The group has been working together to come up with interesting ideas for user feedback management. We're looking for solutions to respond to users in a realistic manner considering that we have no dedicated staff. One option we're thinking about is a more distributed triage system. We want to be sure to help set expectations for our users. We'll be presenting ideas here for input and then to Members for consideration.
Cataloging (Diana Shih)
Going to have conference call next week
Expanding Access (Susan Lynch)
The Expanding Access project is supported by a National Leadership grant from IMLS. Over 2 years, the project will work to make it easier for small institutions, publishers, scholarly societies to contribute content to BHL for first time. The project team will coach new contributors on processes and workflows. If you know of any institutions we ought to contact, send it to Patrick Randall at MCZ.
The other week, the project team attended a boot camp at Smithsonian, 7 members of project team with Martin and BHL Secretariat. As a result we identified several action items, notably we looked at things Bianca works on that could be transferred to project team.
We identified the definition of articles in BHL, article level metadata. The primary responsibility for that work now rests with EABL team.
Also, the EABL team has been using Gemini, using a new component for the project. Mariah and Patrick are developing a survey instrument to help identify new contributors. Mariah also just came back from a visit to UF Gainesville and we're all very excited to begin these conversations with potential new contributors. Susan Lynch is also registered for DPLA fest in DC in April.
The Expanding Access for Biodiversity Literature will need to focus on institutions anywhere in US.
It's worth noting that the project will also be helping existing Affiliates.
