BHL
Archive
This is a read-only archive of the BHL Staff Wiki as it appeared on Sept 21, 2018. This archive is searchable using the search box on the left, but the search may be limited in the results it can provide.
Communications
Meetings & Calls: Minutes & Agendas
2018 Annual Meeting
Listservs
Admin & Governance
Governance
Administration
ByLaws
Financials
Calendar
BHL Consortium
Participating Institutions
Global BHL
Other BHL Partners
Committees
BHL & You! Report on Your:
Presentations
Grant Proposals
General Documentation
BHL Reports & Statistics
Logins & Tools
Collections & Digitization
Help & Documentation
Collection Development Policy
Collections Committee
Cataloging
Deduplication Tools
Member Digitization Docs
Macaw
Gemini Issue Tracker
Metadata
Copyright Issues
Publicity & Outreach
BHL Outreach
BHL Related Meetings
Testimonials
Accomplishments!
3rd Party BHL Mashups
Technical Topics
Code & Tech Docs
Impact of Tech Projects
Tech Advisory Group (TAG)
Purposeful Gaming
BHL v.2.0 (coming soon!)
Projects
Smithsonian Field Book Project
BHL Field Notes Project
Expanding Access
NDSR

bhlstaffcalljul2016

Back to Staff calls main page
Dial 1-877-860-3058 and enter the passcode 961479

Lead: Bianca Crowley
Notetaker: Grace Costantino

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
Row Labels
 Total Issues Open/Unresolved
AMNH
 18
BHL
 175
BHL AFR
 1
BHL AU
 3
BHL MX
 4
BHL SciELO
 2
Cornell
 4
EABL
 235
FBP
 1
Field
 4
HUH
 14
Kew
 11
LC
 2
MBG
 20
MBLWHOI
 5
MCZ
 33
NAL
 3
NHM
 65
NYBG
 84
SIL
 94
Tech
 38
UIUC
 6
(blank)
 0
Grand Total
 822 Resources assigned to 488 Issues

Staff Call Notes 7/21/2016

Ricc Ferrante: Smithsonian Institution Archives.
Harriet Campbell Longley: Works with Alison at NHM London


Leora Siegel, Chicago Botanic Garden – submitted grant proposal to NEH to digitize Language of Flowers books. It’s a $245,000 proposal. All of this content would be uploaded to BHL, and none of the items in the proposal are in BHL as of 2 weeks ago.

Reminder: If you have grants you’re planning to submit, fill out the grant spreadsheet so that we can keep track of grants people are submitting related to BHL: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XyE5BPBFG-Y8mAO0b9elSv75qgk-7WZ26QVT8pxOmSs/edit#gid=0


Connie: New affiliate applications:

Mendel Museum of Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic) accepted. Museum has a collection of Gregor Mendel’s manuscripts, which was have never been accessed on the Internet.

Received application for Bibliothèque cantonale et universitaire - Lausanne (BCU, Lausanne, Switzerland). It is currently being voted on by the Members.

Národní Muzeum (National Museum, Prague) recently joined as Affiliate as well. NMP's Scientific Secretary, Dr. Jiří Frank, also serves as the BHL Europe representative to the Global BHL Committee. More on new affiliates: http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2016/07/bhl-adds-three-new-affiliates.html


Member call notes are available on the wiki: Meetings+and+Conference+Calls


Susan Lynch: EABL folks will use this field regularly, but generally it will probably be business as usual for most people. Scanning institution field should only be populated if it differs from the contributor.

Joel Richard: BHL portal move still in a holding pattern. Have been working through some web vulnerabilities that the scanning software picked up. Waiting to hear back from OCIO tech team. As soon as we have a schedule for the actual move of the website to the SI, we will send email and will give at least 2 weeks notice before the move occurs.


Collections Committee talking about exposing copy specific information for items in BHL UI. This data is already in BHL but is not public. Also talking about how to populate that field in a standardized way. This data might include provenance information, specifics about binding, etc., and is specific to that individual copy of the volume. This would be especially useful for rare items.

Leslie Overstreet, Rare Book Curator at Smithsonian Libraries, is also providing insight into what data is relevant and things that need to be considered in implementation. This is not high on the priority list for getting into the U, but as timeline gets closer Bianca will keep people posted.

Also talking about collections questions related to EABL. The Committee is reviewing a list of titles for consideration. If you have questions about content you want to include, email them to Bianca (CrowleyB@si.edu) and she can run by Committee.

You can also sit in on calls, every other Monday at 2pm ET. There is also a collections listserv. If you have questions you want posed to the group, email to Bianca and she can also share through this listserv.


Diana Shih: Nothing has happened on the group for a while. The group needs to be revived. This will be done by the next call.

The Cataloging group works on problems submitted through Gemini of mostly bibliographic issues like merging records that are very complex or changing author names/merging author names. Also to some extent resequencing records.

If you have cataloging questions for BHL, you can ask this group. There are only around a dozen issues assigned to the cataloging group in Gemini at this point.

Gemini is the issue tracking system used by BHL to collect and manage user feedback. We can follow-up with users who submit feedback via this system.

Bianca triages issues that come into Gemini, assigning them to people or groups. A question that has come up a few times is whether or not we’re comfortable making the issues in our system transparent to our users, meaning that our users could access the whole list of issues that might be in our system.

What’s the goal? Try to increase transparency about our process. Some of our users have expressed desire to be able to see progress on the issues and see a list of books that have been requested.

Suzanne: Transparency should not be our final end game, but communication.
We need to find a way to keep users better informed about the progress of their issues. The system has always been an internal system, so we shouldn’t make it visible.

Connie: I agree, and not all of our users are asking about this visibility. Only some.

Matt: Perhaps a one-paragraph quarterly update that would be on the feedback submission form to say that in the last few months we’ve had x amount of issues so that people know that things are happening without giving them the opportunity to see all of our comments.

Susan: I also think there are privacy concerns related to making this data visible. When people submit these issues they don’t expect this information to be publicly available to everyone. I don’t want to make everything visible, but in most systems the person who submits an issue can see their own issues. If there is a way to let users be able to see their own issues, that might be something of interest.

Bianca: (In response to question from Barbara Ferry) There are currently 710 open scan requests. 30 have not been processed yet. As far as suggestion for users to see their own issues, there is a way that we could do that pretty easily. We can also make certain fields hidden, like privacy-related ones, if we desired. My question was prompted by trying to come up with a way to communicate to users more automatically through the Gemini system. As the triage-er for the system, I’m trying to find ways to make our communication related to the system more apparent to the users.

Barbara: Do we usually let people know when new items are scanned and uploaded to BHL?

Susan: When I fulfill a request I always send an email when it’s fulfilled, but it can sometimes take a while for the request to be fulfilled.

It’s up to the institution to provide notification to the user if desired when scan requests are fulfilled. Many institutions do.

Tomoko: The main problem is we don’t have enough people managing this system. We really need more people involved in this process. We talked some about this in London.

Suzanne: Gemini has always been a wonderful way for us to keep track of things but it is also a high workload. We need to add to the wishlist some idea of closing the issue when something is scanned that could maybe prompt an automatic email to the user.

Tomoko: I’m happy to talk with Bianca further about these issues. I volunteered to help.

Barbara: I will also volunteer to talk about this topic.

If anyone is interested in volunteering, please email Bianca.


See agenda.

Bianca: Is this the kind of thing that’s useful to see. Do you want to see more stats like this?

Suzanne: Unresolved doesn’t mean that it’s not being moved forward. We need to be careful that this doesn’t turn into a “shaming game.”

Connie: Just general stats like this aren’t very helpful. Standing alone they don’t tell us much. We need more detail, e.g. what kinds of issues are they?

Tomoko: It is useful to know what’s outstanding. Being aware is the first step to knowing what your institution is responsible for.

Matt: We could link to the annual report to provide more details about the Gemini system and issued received. The reports include a page with these stats.

General Question: Would people submitting feedback click on a link to see more information if they want to know more about our feedback? 1 person said yes


I am in the process of clearing out some of my backlog, so you might see some changes to issues that you’re assigned to as I work through that.


Patrick: Working on article and segment metadata. Will have more to report soon. The team is also presenting at Natural History Collections Document workshop next month hosted at the Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

There are also a few new blog posts about what EABL has been up to, including a permissions post that highlights the 35 new in-copyright titles we received over past 3 months: http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2016/07/april-showers-bringnew-in-copyright.html

Other recent post on the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society: http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2016/07/the-pennsylvania-horticultural-society.html

EABL is also working on a scanning contract with IA so that we can digitize content from providers to include in BHL.

Lesley: American Libraries website posted about EABL, CLIR and Arcadia projects: https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2016/07/14/fielding-field-notes-comeback/


Connie: We’re in the process of developing job descriptions for residents that we will hire. We should be sending those out in the next couple of weeks. The news should hit the BHL blog and listervs in the next couple of weeks. Anticipated start date for the residents is January 1, 2017. Everyone in the grant is also doing Lynda.com courses on management and mentoring. The project team has calls every couple of weeks. They are also deciding on what questions to use for the interview process and how to manage that process.

Leora and Christine have started making plans for how to do collections analysis and gap analysis.

Leora: Christine and I had a call with Jackie and Robin from Smithsonian Libraries about their fern collection project to learn more about possible collection analysis processes.



BHL metadata is in OCLC or Worldcat. We are in the process (thanks to contacts via Suzanne) of cleaning up data in those records. We will be removing all BHL records with the BHLMR code from Worldcat because they are bad records or are duplicates. We will also work with OCLC to replace records with better data. If you notice that records are no longer available, that’s why. OCLC cannot remove records if they have holdings from other libraries on them. If you have taken these records into your catalogs and assigned holdings from your institutions, those records should not be deleted. Only those with no holdings associated will be deleted.

Suzanne: If anyone has put their holdings on a BHL record in OCLC, and you’re the only other holder, it would be good for you to remove your holdings so we can get the record out and replaced with a better record.

If you’re planning to use BHLMR code records for analysis, know this is going on. If you’re doing import of records from OCLC, wait until we’ve gotten the records cleaned up in OCLC.

Please take this info back to appropriate staff at your library. Let Bianca/Suzanne (PilskS@si.edu) know if you have concerns/questions.




BHL CafePress store launched on April 11, 2016 as part of our BHL@10 campaign. It launched with a small selection of content featuring the BHL@10 logo and a few images from BHL. We viewed the launch of the store as an experiment to see how the public responded to it, how much time it takes on our end to develop it, and whether it was a viable means of raising funds for BHL. We also added another small selection of products to the store around World Oceans Day to see how store collections created for events would perform.

Since launch, gross sales from the store have been $864.77, which amounts to a $208.67 profit to BHL. This comes with very little publicity on our end –1 blog post, 2 emails, 2 Facebook posts, and 8 tweets are the extent of our marketing efforts to date, which means that the $200+ profit is encouraging.

Pending Member approval for continued store development and including a wider variety of images scanned by additional Members in the store, all products to date feature images from books scanned by SIL and one book from MCZ, for which we received explicit permission from MCZ to include as part of our World Oceans Day collection.

Last week we presented a report to Members that detailed store performance to date and provided a proposal for continued store development. Members were asked to decide whether to continue store development and if so, provide input on the proposal. Proposal linked in the agenda.

Members have approved continuing store development according to the proposal outlined in the report.

The store will only include images from public domain books scanned by Members that have opted-in to having their images included in the store. Each member must complete the form (linked in the proposal) to either opt-in or opt-out of including images in the store.

All proceeds will be added to the pan-BHL scanning fund. Being able to market the store to the public as all proceeds being used to digitize more books for BHL is a huge selling feature.

We will plan to expand marketing efforts around social media and email marketing in the future as well. Once BHL is moved to SIL servers, we will also look into adding links to the store from BHL itself. SIL is hoping to host an intern this Fall that will help create products for the store, expand our marketing efforts, and create a best practices and guidelines document.

Product development will be built around events, including BHL campaigns, topics that have proven popular with our online audiences (to be determined based on analysis of popular social media, blog, and BHL book collection content), and staff suggestions. In the agenda you will see a link to a form (http://bit.do/CafePressSuggestions) where you can submit ideas for books and products to include in the store. Within that form you can also access a list of the institutions that have to-date opted-in to being included in the store. Also linked in the agenda is a list of the available product types offered in CafePress. Please feel free to submit your ideas at any point.

All of the documents and details related to the store are linked on the BHL Outreach wiki page under the CafePress section. That page is linked in the agenda.

If there are any questions about the store, Grace Costantino (CostantinoG@si.edu) is your point of contact.