bhlstaffcalljul2015
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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
- Member digitization funding pool update (Carolyn)
- Round Robin (all): Curious to know if any of your institutions virtual reference software or any kind of CRM (customer relationship management) or "knowledge base" software to take questions and share documentation with your patrons/users?
- (Bianca remember re BHL Discovery Tools & BHL Move updates)
- Gemini update (Jackie)
- There are now 1538 open issues in Gemini
- There are 12 fewer open issues than during our June call
- As a reminder, there were 1550 open issues for our June call, which was an all time high!
- 77 issues have been created since our April call, 54 of which are still open.
- For comparison, we received 189 issues for our May call, followed by 185 for our June call
- This represents a dramatic reduction from recent highs.
- This gave us a chance to decrease the number of open issues in Gemini for the first time since January! (if only by 12...).
- Thanks for responding directly to users when you can! This is a huge service that many of you have been providing.
- Users appreciate being notified when their scanning requests have been completed.
- Reminder: put any BHL praise in the Testimonials page, and feel free to send leads for BHL and Our Users over to Grace.
- Administrative Dashboard , aka our "Portal Editing" tool is moving from MOBOT to SI (Bianca and Mike)
- Enables further move of BHL Website from MOBOT to SI
- Move anticipated for 1st week of August - email announcement to follow
- URL will stay the SAME - keep your bookmarks! - but login screen will look different
- You will need to CHANGE your password to conform to new rules instructions
- Launching Monday, July 20: Altmetric and MyTweeps on BHL! (Grace)
- BHL Staff Meeting planning update (Bianca)
Notes
Attending
Bianca, Grace, Carolyn, Diana Duncan, Susan Lynch, Julia Blase, Matthew Bolin, Matt Person, Alison Harding, Pat Murphy (NAL), Joe DeVeer, Keri, Cathy Buckwalder (ANSP), Diana Shih (AMNH), JJ and Keiko (Harvard Botany), Trish Rose-Sandler (MOBOT), Joel Richard (SIL), Jackie Chapman (SIL), Marty Schlabach (Cornell), Martin Kalfatovic
BHL Website issues
Experiencing server issues this morning, PDF generator down, website loading very slowly. Content is available through IA, our site not functioning as it should but homepage not loading so difficult to load. Alerted users via social media. Email alerts to list are useful for forwarding, Bianca will get that out. Round Robin, virtual reference, knowledge base
Pan-BHL Scanning
Period of Performance for Pan-BHL funds runs through August 31 and we currently have a balance of $1,742.81 We’re in the process of adding $20,000 to the Pan-BHL Scanning contract and we hope that those will be available very soon. These new funds will also extend the period of performance to March 1, 2016. Please note that IF the new funds are not available by August 31 or if the balance reaches $500 before August 31, I will lock the pan-BHL scanning spreadsheets. We are hopeful that there will not need to be a gap but if that does happen, I’ll of course notify the Staff list with the details of what that means for you and anticipated date for re-opening it. Send any questions to Carolyn at sheffieldc@si.edu.
Round Robin
Diana Duncan (Field) – One shipment out. No virtual reference software in place
Susan Lynch (NYBG) – Don Wheeler on vacation today; NYBG uses LibAnswers through SpringShare used primarily by Plant Information people. Couple thousand entries in it, growing bulbs, caring for different kinds of plants. We’ve talked about librarians and archivists using in future, would need to partition. Group of people from NYBG visited IA scanning center, very illuminating. Another shipment to scanning center, to satisfy Gemini requests. Grant proposal to include tabletop scribe going in soon.
Julia (SIL) – The Field Book Project is starting up again. Start digitizing again on July 27. Ready to go. Has used CRM before, SalesForce really geared towards customer management for sales purposes. Suggests looking into Insightly and Blazedesk. FBP had lapse in funding, now back. Digitize 2,600 items in next two years. Working with SIA and NMNH to scan contribute all to BHL, also long term storage in SI systems, goes to DPLA as well. Feel free to contact us with any field book questions or plans you may wish to discuss
Diana Shih & Matthew Bolin (AMNH) – sent a new shipment last week, of all Gemini request. No virtual reference things. Working on QA from previous shipment
Matt Person (MBLWHOI) – Status quo. No virtual reference or CRM. Regular social media participation. Keeping up with Gemini requests
Alison Harding (NHM) – Next week we get another person from Wellcome to work 1-2 days a week to work on tabletop, hoping she is already trained up. Don’t have CRM. Used a MS one for awhile but always a bit wonky. Alison will share the documentation for tabletop with everybody
Pat Murphy (NAL) – continue onsite IA scanning, seed and nursery catalogs, 600 catalogs from 1912 and a few scan requests. Using RefTracker internally. Has potential to be customer knowledge base but hasn’t put into action.
Joe DeVeer (MCZ) – status quo. no virtual reference software. Shipment out from early June still being worked on at IA. Tabletop scribe that was recently purchased may arrive as early as next week.
Keri and Jackie (SIL) – Status quo. In-house scanning. Hired our IA contractor and he is now a SIL employee, can bridge work b/w IA and SIL/BHL. Discovering many darkened items in IA and following up with that.
If other folks need a list of darkened items please email Bianca, crowleyb@si.edu
JJ and Keiko (Harvard Botany) – Also excited about tabletop coming. Done a few more things in Macaw.
Joel Richard (SIL) – In terms of the BHL move to SIL, not much has changed over here. Working on acquiring database server. Looks like migration will be October or November. Mike working on new login, in testing and looks good. Overall going well, just waiting on infrastructure.
Marty Schlabach (Cornell) – Things are pretty good at Cornell. Not aware of any virtual reference software in place. At Mann Library, we use Confluence; more of a wiki for ongoing questions that may involve input from multiple staff. Focusing on Seed and Nursery, now focusing on UK. Sent out 13,000 pages to vendor. Working on shipment #6. In-house scanning for special collections materials. Material that is in Mann Library, had a temp that need to replace. Have a scanner in Mann Library that we recently got. Have you had any interaction with new SI Secretary Skorton (was at Cornell)? BC: Yes SIL has! We hear he's very supportive of libraries
Martin (SIL) – Skorton is interested in both humanities and sciences. We’ve been very pleased that he seems supportive and interested in libraries. William is back at home. Not estimated for return for work. Hope to have him back on regular calls soon.
Cathy (ANSP) - Waiting for shipment to come back and another shipment prepared. Closer to trying some internal scanning and using Macaw, maybe August. Entomology Dept writing a grant to scan field books and interested in uploading to BHL, grant to be submitted by end of year. Getting internal set-up for that. Getting archivists into discussion. Don’t really have reference software in place.
Richard Hulser, in absentia (NHM LA) "I will be in London for the Internet Librarian International conference in October and give a paper on use of almetrics. I had a paper accepted for VALA2016 in Melbourne, Australia on the same topic. Anyway, I plan to be at the BHL meeting in London in March. I’m also still working on some internal challenges to go forward with the offer by the Smithsonian to digitize NHM publications for inclusion into BHL."
Metadata Working Group update (Bianca)
Adam Chandler leading us through mapping BHL metadata to other library systems, eg Summons, DPLA, OCLC knowledge base. KBART is one of standards mapping it to. Have Mike on calls to help with that. How MARC is going into BHL. Where we need to pull it to get into KBART schema. Should inform other metadata requirements down the road. KBART and DPLA as well
Gemini (Jackie)
Thank you to all who are responding directly to users when you can. If you would like to do that, feel free to do so from your personal work email addresses. Sometimes we get some great praise from those interactions. Please let us know by adding to testimonials from BHL Blog. Can also forward to Grace for possible participation in BHL & Our Users series.
Admin Dash Logins (Joel)
Will be changing with the move to SIL. Preceding move of website Don’t have to do anything right now Probably will happen first week of August Bianca will instructions on changing password
AltMetric and MyTweeps (Grace)
Both will launch on Monday Will announce publicly via social media Index other sites like Google Plus and Mendeley and many others For Mining Biodiversity, worked with AltMetrics to use URIs. Check out links to explore how to access mentions of BHL content, aggregated by AltMetric donut. Start April 2014 Go back into agenda there is a note Tracks links to link to item, page, or part (i.e., “article”) levels. Not tracked to title or bibliography page.
MyTweeps, developed by Ryerson, following a particular twitter network, explore people who follow BHL on Twitter. Shows their trending hashtags, their locations, and relationships. Most populare BHL books from that week.
BHL Staff Meeting 2015 Bianca working on getting a block of rooms set aside for booking and to announce details for booking as soon as that is ready.
