bhlstaffcallfeb2017
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Dial from U.S.: 1-877-860-3058
Dial from outside U.S.: link to international conference lines
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.
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)
- Any news to report?
- Any questions / comments?
- User feedback management aka "Gemini" (Bianca)
- Grant Projects:
- Expanding Access - IMLS (Patrick Randall/Mariah Lewis)
- NDSR grant (Connie Rinaldo/Joe deVeer)
- I’d like to set up informal interviews with BHL librarians and staff about who our users are, their interactions with BHL, and how images fit into users’ work and your work. Any opinions on image discovery or use from your perspective? Please contact Ariadne at ariadne.rehbein@mobot.org so we can set up a phone or skype call!
- Field Notes including CLIR & Smithsonian/Arcadia (Adriana Marroquin)
- Committee reports:
- EC & Members group (EC or Member volunteer to report?)
- BHL annual meeting update (Carolyn Sheffield)
- Technical Team (Joel Richard)
- Macaw uploader
- Global Names Architecture Mtg (Mike Lichtenberg)
- Collections Committee (Bianca Crowley)
- Cataloging (Diana D.)
- Documentation FYI (Bianca)
Notes
Anyone new?
Marissa King, NDSR resident at NHM LAC
Outreach
Grace created a new Pinterest board for Diane for frontispieces
Round Robin Updates
Michael Cook - Side conversation w Bianca and Joel on PDF quality coming from IA
Language of flowers from 1862, 300 DPI, JPEG 2000, but then when you download full PDF that IA generates it’s very lossy and compressed
If you select pages to create a PDF, those look fine.
Has anyone else noticed this issue?
Joe at MCZ – noticed digitally, not with PDF, JP2 fine on our end, but extremely lossy in book viewer. Wondered if they’re processing them differently
Ari at MOBOT
NH Magazine from 2010, Noticed when you download PDF, they look strange. Scanned a few years back. Haven’t noticed in more recent things sent to IA, but haven’t looked at those that closely. Seems kind of random
Bianca can contact IA on Slack
Michael – perhaps we could start a Gemini issue where folks can comment on what they’re seeing.
Absolutely
Susan – don’t think it’s random. Would be good to compile as a table or spreadsheet to help us identify patterns. IA Identifier and as much info as possible on how processing was done.
Mike – not a bad idea. Would be curious to know what you’re using to look at PDFs – Firefox, Chrome, standard PDF reader. Doesn’t sound like that’s what’s happening but would worthwhile to see if that is a commonality
Forum thread on IA, users and contributors had complained about PDF quality. They had set a threshold to keep file size low, that was from 2010
Mai – NH in 2010, bound volumes, quite thick, over 500 pages. Very image heavy Wonder if part of it… maybe smaller ones aren’t losing as much resolution
Gemini
2016 in Review
See Pie Chart in Agenda
All issues submitted between 1st of Jan and December,
Components can be more than one. Lumped Technical Feedback
Collections issues include scan requests
Also EABL managing tasks thru Gemini
Susan Eubank – what is total count? What does 19% represent?
1526 issues for CY2016
654 from Staff – kudos to Susan L and Jackie C for encouraging us to track that
1201 issues closed
1900 issues to go!
Grant Projects
EABL – Patrick 3835 volumes and 424,000+ pages
129 in copyright permissions
DPLA completed a test of MODS harvest
Trish, BC, and SL reviewing issues identified
Mariah completing a training at LA Zoo and LAC Arboretum this week
LAC NHM – it was a great workshop, we got a lot out of it
Looking forward to getting the stuff into BHL
NDSR – Connie
Great boot camp workshop, learning about all things BHL
Plus some tours of LC and at SI
Questions from Ari MBG, Image discovery project:
Call for volunteers to talk about experience helping people use BHL, especially if images have been part of that. Or not – would be good to hear other opinions, too.
Please feel free to contact Ari directly
Residents are also putting together a blog where you can follow what they're working on
And Foundations to Actions on public wiki – bios of all residents
Members Meeting Update
Planning is coming together nicely. Many thanks to our colleagues at NLB Singapore.
Lots of fabulous venues and agendas coming together for productive meetings.
Videoconferencing will be available for different sessions, though via different systems depending on venue where the meeting is held. We’ll be distributing instructions to Partners closer to meeting dates.
Tech Meeting
We are planning an in-person Tech Meeting this September in St. Louis. NDSR mentors and residents will be invited to join. More detail will be shared once available.
Tech Team Report
Macaw
Joel – Macaw, new processes
Adriana found that page images will go in exactly as uploaded. Let’s say heterogeneous in naming convention, will appear as uploaded. Re-ordering can be onerous
Soon we’ll be asking Macaw to re-order on an alphanumeric sort
Very gentle reminder – if you have something in Macaw that is incomplete, please complete it
Global Names
Mike: Dima now at UIUC, came down to MBG
Discussed name finding service, including sustainability
Had always been grant funded, now part of job description so now there are dedicated staff time for those services
Also discussed how to provide feedback. We’ve been collecting via Gemini and notifying him; decision was to continue as is.
He’s hoping to re-architect service to re-index in 2 days instead of 2 months as it is currently now. No timeline but we’ll keep fingers crossed.
Collections Committee Update
Hathi Trust call – Connie, Bianca, Kelli Trei talked with CEO of Hathi Trust and 2 project folks. Discussed shared problems and areas we’d like to explore.
We will be following up with them in a couple of months
Linnaeus Link Organization –
Accumulating a catalog of L works and linking to online
Soulsby numbers – now an identifier within the BHL system
Collection Analysis
Working with Alicia Esquivel
Cataloging
Diana – 10 issues and closed 1
Documentation
Links to the following are available in the agenda above.
Pagination – in progress. Put together by a SIL Tech some time ago. Updating now
Editing author documentation – merging names; hope to finish this one soon
Page Uploader – will be uploading this to reflect recent changes in Macaw
