bhlstaffcalljul2017
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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: Randy Smith
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) -
TYPE DIRECTLY in the google doc
Agenda
- Reminder: Toggle Mute/Unmute using *6
- New to the call? Please introduce yourself and welcome! (Randy)
- Outreach update (Grace)
Round Robin Updates / Open Discussion (All)
- News to report? Questions/Comments?
- (Update on Bianca's status) - Jul 11, 2017 I better be around to do this myself!
Grant Projects:
- Expanding Access -- IMLS (Patrick Randall/Mariah Lewis)
- NDSR grant -- (Joe deVeer/Connie Rinaldo)
- Field notebooks CLIR/Arcadia -- (Adriana Marroquin)
Committee reports:
Gemini Update (Randy)
- 126 issues received for June, a bit up from May’s numbers -- 51% of those issues are being entered by BHL Staff.
- 25 scan requests remain unclaimed as yet -- 742 scan requests are open and in progress
- Special thanks those folks who will be stepping in to help with Gemini while Bianca is out: Diane Rielinger, Susan Lynch, Alison Harding, Joe deVeer, and Jackie Chapman!
Any other Questions / Comments?
- New Google Analytics custom dimension for sponsor ID. This will allow us to track usage by sponsor, which will be especially helpful for grant-funded scanning. However, note that "sponsor" is a free-text field in BHL. In order to accurately track usage by sponsor ID, please make sure you enter your sponsor values in a consistent format.
REMINDER: Next call is scheduled for Thursday August 17 @ 11am ET
Notes
New to the Call:
Joanna Durant – from Kew Gardens – first time on the call.
Susan Braxton – from UIUC – first time on the call.
Outreach update (Grace):
Grant Projects:
Expanding Access -- IMLS (Patrick Randall/Mariah Lewis)
Patrick Randall: The project has been securing permission for more in-copyright publications, and has obtained permission for 165 titles at this point. EABL has also added over 80 new contributors to BHL, so it is closing in on the goal of 100. The team is continuing work with the DPLA harvest and article-ization. A
blog post went up today about the EABL trip to the CBHL conference in Minnesota. Next week, Patrick will present a poster at SAA (Society of American Archivists).
NDSR grant -- (Joe deVeer/Connie Rinaldo)
Connie Rinaldo: Pam published the individual survey, which is collecting feedback from users on the new features they’d like to see in BHL. It is linked from the BHL homepage and was promoted via social media and email. The survey responses will help inform priorities for future developments.
In September, there will be a tech meeting at the Missouri Botanical Garden, where residents will all report on their work. Currently, we are about half way through the residents' year, which will end in December. This meeting will be the beginning of the recommendation process to the BHL community based on findings from the grant. Connie is also working on writing the interim report.
Field notebooks CLIR/Arcadia -- (Adriana Marroquin)
Arcadia-funded Smithsonian Field Book Project: You’ll remember that the project brought on a metadata contractor who was working on a backlog of items to catalog. The project has now surpassed the cataloging goal of 2000 – 2013 item have now been cataloged. The project is continuing to work on digitization and metadata. Another 80 items were added to BHL. Current project numbers are: 959 field books digitized; 847 added to IA and BHL.
BHL Field Notes Project, CLIR funded – The next statistical report is due at the end of the month. The project has digitized 20% of the goal - just over 100,000 pages. More items have been added to BHL: 473 items published in BHL to date, which is 40,719 pages (just under 10% of goal).
The group is applying for another CLIR grant to keep the project going. They have been invited to the second round of applications. The group will meet next week to discuss feedback on the first application and submit a proposal for the second round of applications.
Committee reports:
EC & Members group (Martin Kalfatovic OR EC/Member volunteer to report)
Connie Rinaldo: The EC has mostly been working on a draft of the strategic plan so that it can be reviewed by members in the fall. The draft is being informed by discussions and brainstorming that occurred at the 2017 annual meeting this past March. The EC is also working on better-defining member benefits and discussing how we can differentiate between affiliates and members. They are looking at other models like DPLA and the Medical Heritage Library to get ideas about how to define member benefits. Gildas Illien (MNHN) and David Iggulden (Kew) have also contributed thoughts based on their own experience selling the member benefits to their institutions.
Technical Team (Joel Richard)
BHL Tech Team Gemini workspace
http://biodiversitylibrary.countersoft.net/workspace/1352/items
Joel Richard: The tech team met only twice since the last staff call. You’ll remember that some further MARC XML verification was added to Macaw, but more than a few people encountered warnings/errors when uploading content as a result, so the rules were relaxed and the team will revisit the topic at a later date. No one should be experiencing problems with uploads any longer.
The full text search server is coming along. SI is making the final configurations to the server now. Next week SI will be doing the first harvest of OCR records to start testing the functionality. The tech team will let people know once things are ready in beta to start testing.
Collections Committee (Patrick Randall)
Alicia is working with Martin to see how we might continue to collaborate with JSTOR on their topicgraph tool for collections analysis. She is also working on a tool to parse geo locations from full text and is using the global names API to see if we can filter scientific names and give them more context, like plant vs. animal. The committee is still working on the page redaction policy. The call for this policy came as a result of some archival content digitized from Field that had sensitive information in it. Diana Duncan will have examples of actual redacted pages in BHL soon for everyone to look at.
The committee is also making progress on cropping guidelines and the BHL ILL policy.
Cataloging (Diana Duncan)
Currently there are 20 open issues for the cataloging group.
Gemini Update (Randy Smith):
• 126 issues received for June, a bit up from May’s numbers -- 51% of those issues are being entered by BHL Staff.
• 25 scan requests remain unclaimed as yet -- 742 scan requests are open and in progress
• Special thanks those folks who will be stepping in to help with Gemini while Bianca is out: Diane Rielinger, Susan Lynch, Alison Harding, Joe deVeer, and Jackie Chapman!
Diane Rielinger: How do we find unclaimed scan requests?
Jackie Chapman: Everyone in Gemini should have 2 shared workspaces: Edit and Scan. Edit is for portal edits that are unclaimed. Scan is for unclaimed scan requests that we should all look at and try to claim and take on as we can.
Randy Smith: MBG is starting scanning again with volunteers, so maybe we can start filling in scan requests if we have materials.
Any other Questions / Comments?
Custom Dimension for Sponsor:
Grace Costantino: We have added a new Google Analytics custom dimension for sponsor ID. This will allow us to track usage by sponsor, which will be especially helpful for grant-funded scanning. However, note that "sponsor" is a free-text field in BHL. In order to accurately track usage by sponsor ID, please make sure you enter your sponsor values in a consistent format.
Background: We have started implementing some custom dimensions in Google Analytics that will allow us to get more granular data on content usage by item and contributor. Sponsor was added just this week to get additional usage based on sponsor.
Custom dimensions only start aggregating data at the point that you implement them (which is mid-March for items and contributors, mid-July for sponsor), but it will continue to aggregate data going forward.
Bianca is working on creating dashboards for members that can be shared and allow you to get usage statistics for your own content. She will continue working on those after returning from maternity leave. In the meantime if you have questions, email Grace (CostantinoG@si.edu).
lipscombb Jul 11, 2017 I better be around to do this myself!