bhlstaffcalljul192012notes

Notes from BHL Staff Call, July 19, 2012

Attending:

Agenda:

News

• Chris Freeland has accepted a new position at Washington University to be the Senior Director of Academic Computing for the university. His last day will be Friday, July 27. He will be staying on as a research associate at MOBOT, which will allow him to remain the PI for the BHL grant administered through MOBOT, including the MacArthur subaward, NEH grant, and NSF Global Names Project grant. He intends to stay closely involved with BHL and has had many conversations with the BHL Executive Team to decide what to do to in terms of transferring management for technical development for BHL. BHL will likely appoint William Ulate as the new technical director.

BHL Staff Face-to-Face Meeting Status

• Meeting dates and location still to be determined
• Chris Freeland: We want to have the meeting in the fall. There have been a couple of dates suggested, with a specific interest in a block of time in October. We looked into D.C. and NY as location options, but they are incredibly expensive. We are considering San Francisco. I'm not aware of any further decisions. This group will know as soon as a decision has been made and will be included in the decision-making process.
• John Migneault: NYBG would love to have it here, but accomodations and expenses make it difficult. There are also other events in the area during this time that make it difficult to find accommodations.
• Question: Who will be attending this meeting?
  • Bianca: It would be everyone on the staff calls. This is meant to be a mirror of the meeting at Life and Literature in Chicago. We plan to have combined technical and staff meeting with combined and parallel sessions.
• Question: Is it critical that it be held at a BHL member institution? Can we find an outside venue?
  • Chris Freeland: It should be a member institution in the sense that we need locale assistance in getting meeting rooms set up. We get this assistance as in-kind contributions if we do it at a BHL institution, otherwise have to pay for it. We're also trying to hold this meeting in alignment with Simon Sherrin's upcoming trip to the US to harmonize the US and Australia portals. The AU funding ends in October, so this only time Simon can work on harmonization before project ends.

Email Issues into Gemini

• Bianca: You can now forward emails to gemini@biodiversitylibrary.org in order to automatically add these emails as issues in gemini. I set this up because on occasion I get emails in my inbox that should be in gemini. It's easier to forward these issues into gemini to create new issues rather than copying and pasting to create a new issue. Please do not encourage users to use this feature, however. Users should still use the feedback form on the BHL website.
• The subject line in the email will be the title of the ticket in gemini.
• If it is a scan request, please put "scan request" in the subject line so it will come up when we run our statistics.

BHL-Europe Recap

• Bianca: See image in agenda. This is a summary slide from a presentation given during the BHL Europe finale meeting day. The slide is from Henning Scholz and provides a map for the key activities that BHL-Europe worked on.
• Activities of BHL-Europe Project:
  • Portal: The BHL-Europe portal is still in development. The portal is in Drupal. It also has its own ingest software system. All BHL-Europe partners are scanning in house and Europe developed an ingest system that allows partners to contribute files in specific file package format so they can be ingested into the BHL-Europe portal. The portal and ingest are not finished. It was supposed to be released in the fall (release delayed two months to complete ingest of content). There has also been some discussion to move the content in the BHL-Europe portal into IA so we can incorporate it into our portal. BHL-Europe has an incomplete copy of our content and has not started the process of updating this content with new things we've added to BHL. The copy was taken last year through disks sent to NHM. After copying some information from the disks, they started uploading from the cluster in Woods Hole but the process ended a month later without great success.
  • GRIB: Global References Index to Biodiversity. This is supposed to be a global scanlist/global natural history publications deduplication tool. The release for this tool has been delayed quite a bit. Europe is still working on it. They are working with a German for profit cataloging company that put together the cataloging system for the National Library. Maybe early next year there will be some deliverable. Right now we will still continue to use the scanlist. Vienna has committed to continue maintaining the scanlist and will work to update scanlist to make it better, including incorporating new library catalogs into the scanlist. There is currently no timeline on this incorporation.
  • BLE: Biodiversity Library Exhibitions. This is a Drupal-based tool used to create collections based on themes and curate content around that theme, including images, books, factoids, stories, etc. Europe hopes that development will near completion soon, and it will be demoed at TDWG. The new development will allow for individual user accounts. We can use this tool without having to have a local installation; we can use Europe's server and develop exhibitions on their installation. They will provide technical support and development.
  • Gemini: BHL-Europe agreed to work with us in our gemini installation. We have now set up a BHL-Europe project in Gemini. They plan to have their own webform that will feed into their gemini project. We will see how we can work together within the same installation of gemini to deal with content on both portals.
• William: I want to add that there was a willingness from members of BHL-Europe to remain active, continue development and try to find further funding. NHM will host the repository of information for BHL-Europe for at least 5 years. This allows Henning to make funding proposals on top of what has been developed. There are currently two proposals for funding that have been submitted (a third was submitted and rejected).

gBHL Recap

• The Global Meeting followed the Europe meeting. Both were held in Berlin. The global meeting was a two day meeting with representatives from all nodes except China.
• Highlights:
  • Nancy Gwinn made member of the Global BHL Coordinating Committee Executive Committee. She will serve as the secretary. Ely Wallis (BHL-Australi) was named the chair of the executive committee, and Henning Scholz (BHL-Europe) was named vice-chair.
  • There was much discussion about aligning various global projects. This meeting served as a practical discussion of how to align portals.
  • There was a specific agreement to participate together in Gemini among all nodes.
  • There was discussion about using similar metadata fields among all projects, leaving it open so people can use their own language but ensuring that people use at least the same four fields so we can crosswalk among portals.
  • There was discussion of a Global BHL webpage. William and Chris are working on this. This will be a place where we'll pull together public information, like portals, social media, governance structures, personnel, highlights, etc. for all portals.
• William: There was also a commitment to mirror IA content in three places: London, Egypt, and eventually Smithsonian. There was a decision to use IA as a repository to synchronize all global content. BHL-Africa and Australia will be integrating and using digitization tools we already have.
• June 7 Notes
• June 8 Notes

Copyright Metadata Standards

• Bianca: reminder: please use the new copyright metadata standards and see the revised permissions page.

BHL Africa Meeting

• Meeting involved 25 participants from 6 countries in Africa, with 6 reps from BHL US (Martin Kalfatovic, Nancy Gwin, Grace Costantino, William Ulate, Christine Giannoni, Doug Holland). It was held in Cape Town 6/14-15 at the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden (SANBI)
• It was a 2 day event:
  • Day 1) Introduction to BHL, with presentations from African colleagues about their institutional capacities and interests in BHL.
  • Day 2) 4 breakout groups: technical infrastructure, scanning, governance, collaboration.
• Content-wise there isn't a lot of pre-1923 content about Africa that isn't already scanned by other BHL partners. However, there is post 1923 institutional publications, grey literature, and lit published in Africa with limited distribution that these institutions can contribute.
• Issues:
  • Scanning Equipment: IA will gift 1 free Scribe to SANBI; Pretoria already has large digitization set-up. SANBI also to purchase scanning equip but that's all. There was much discussion about how other institutions would have content scanned. Talked about sending equipment across borders but there were concerns about liability for said equipment if this was pursued. It was decided that institutions would not send content across borders to facilities with scanning machines because mail often subject to theft in Africa.
  • Agreed to put BHL-Africa content into IA
  • Interested in using the Scanlist
  • SANBI will purchase a server to host copy of BHL content in Africa
  • Mobile BHL was a big topic. Access to computers is limited in Africa but most people have cell phones and access to internet via this outlet.
  • BHL-in-a-box was also discussed, as this would allow remote areas in Africa with limited or no internet connection to still access BHL content.
• Anna-Lise, SANBI: interim project director until official person selected
• Concept document developed to try to help BHL Africa institutions get buy-in from management to participate. Gracian Chimwaza of Kenya to work on getting a single BHL Africa MOU drafted.
• African colleagues hope to reconvene at Berlin 10 meeting in November, which will be held in Cape Town. At this meeting they hope to officially sign the MOU and officially announce BHL-Africa.
• June 14 Notes
• June 15 Notes

Quarterly Report

• The new quarterly report is now available for April-June 2012: http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Reports

Calendar and Conferences

• Please remember to post events to calendar by sending an appointment to biodiversitylibrary@gmail.com
• You can find upcoming conferences of interest to BHL here:Conferences+and+Grants

Round Robin

• Sent a new shipment to Smithsonian.
• Mathew Bolin: At some point we should discuss the IA outages. Last week IA went down and there didn't seem to be any reporting chain in place to inform others that this happened. This is not an isolated event - IA has gone out in the past. Can we discuss what the procedure will be for dealing with outages, a process to inform members that there is an outage, and a process to deal with incoming messages from users about outages.
• Bianca: email me with these concerns and I will try to get to Martin and other execs to discuss.

• Marty: We are continuing to work on scanning entomology rare material. We're working on searching for materials in our ent rare collection to see if they've been scanned before. We will be working with a vendor for scanning this batch. We hope to create more ent rare online content. This desire is in relation to our recent closure of our separate entomology facility, which has now been incorporated into the Mann Library Collection. We've created a virtual ent collection: a catalog at this point of all entomology content at Cornell. It is available at entomology.mannlib.cornell.edu. Some content is licensed content, some not. Some are just bibliographic records.
• There was also a recent meeting held at nybg to potentially scan seed catalogs collaboratively.

• Don: Seed Catalogs: This issue came up thanks to a taxonomist working at Cornell. He was interested in the published names of plants introduced through nursery catalogs rather than through scientific literature. These names are not well-documented or registered officially through other sources. Between 1820-1890, a great deal of explroation and importation of new plants for commercial purposes of fruits, vegetables and ornamentals occurred. This was not done on a scientific basis but by nurseries. Information about this material was published through nursery catalogs. 14 people, some from SIL, Cornell, and NYBG, met to discuss getting these catalogs scanned. We met to determine what each institution has, how it's cataloged, and how to get it out to the public. We hope to meet again in the fall to continue moving forward. NYBG is the only library attempting to catalog seed catalogs and make records available broadly to public through the NYBG catalog.
• Scanning Update: We're sending over 300 items to Kirtas next week. This is not primarily BHL content but it is somewhat and will eventually be incorporated into BHL.

• Sent 50 items to IA (Fort Wayne facility) - mostly gemini requests and rare entomology publications.

• Sending shipment of 75 items to IA tomorrow. Mostly gemini requests and a few things from legacy catalog collections. Rare content being scanned in house. Soon going to start testing sending stuff to IA via Macaw.

• Scanning gemini requests, trying to prioritize permissions titles. Scanning slow due to herbarium grant that scanners are working on.

• We have a new scanning person in place but he's only working 2 days a week, so scanning is slow. We're working through gemini requests.

• Still scanning primarily Gemini requests, prioritizing permissions titles. We're sending 20-30 items for scanning per week.

• We've started scanning some gemini requests. We're still working on building our scanning process. We're hoping to get more scanners in the next couple months.

• We continue to fulfill Gemini requests and are working towards a small shipment of these to IA.
  Otherwise...Summer chugging along in busy Woods Hole. Our office proximity to MBL's EOL group gives us more opportunities to demonstrate BHL to regular tour groups here - the BHL-EOL combined "tour" is a great story to tell!