bhlstaffcalljul2018
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Staff calls main page
Dial from U.S.: 1-877-860-3058
Dial from outside U.S.: link to international conference lines
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) -
TYPE DIRECTLY in the google doc
Agenda
Reminder: Toggle Mute/Unmute using *6
New to the call? Please introduce yourself and welcome!
Committee Updates
Secretariat
- Pan-BHL scanning fund (Carolyn) -- funding pool is currently closed but expected to open up again after September 18. Contract structure is changing for the future.
- Private and public wiki migrations (Bianca and Grace)
- New Partners
Technical Team (Carolyn Sheffield or Joel Richard)
- How is your BHL full text search experience going?
- Internet Archive updates and BHL harvest issues (Mike Lichtenberg)
Executive Council / Members
Collections Committee (Bianca Crowley)
- 108,445 Total Pages contributed for June ==> lowest monthly total in 3 years likely because pan BHL scanning funds closed since November 2017. Thanks a million to all BHL partners that have been able to sustain digitization through the generous contribution of their own funding sources!
- Collections Committee discussing the future of e-content acquisitions to the BHL collection:
- Content IN BHL is ideal ==> can apply BHL value added services on content
- But is it worth effort to upload via Macaw if already freely available online?
Cataloging Group (Diana Duncan)
Project updates
- Field Book Project (Bianca for Ricc Ferrante)
- FYI the Field Notes Project funded by CLIR has been completed, please see a summary here
- 229 field books with concentrations in Alexander Wetmore, Edgar Mearns and Waldo Schmitt in progress for integration into BHL
- Staffing issues but consistent with 20 items digitized/week goal
- Transcriptions! 1) Launching crowdsourcing campaign to transcribe the slide-based field notes from the Waldo LaSalle Schmitt personal papers 2) submitting field book transcriptions to Mike Lichtenberg for testing in replacing BHL OCR with transcribed text
- NDSR (Leora)
Round Robin (All)
- Is the every other month BHL Staff conference call schedule working? or not?
Outreach Update (Grace Costantino)
Next Call
Anticipated September 20, 2018
Notes
Committee Updates
Secretariat
• Pan-BHL scanning fund (Carolyn)
Funding pool is currently closed but expected to open up again after September 18. Current contract has limitations on period of performance and how we can add funds. The next batch of funds (about 5,000 USD) we’ve added to the current contract should become available on Sept. 19. We are also looking at setting up a separate contract through Smithsonian that will provide more control about periods of performance and the amount of funds we can add. Stay tuned for more information.
• Private and public wiki migrations (Bianca and Grace)
Private Wiki
Bianca working on migrating public wiki to Smithsonian Institution's external Confluence site ("the Cadillac of wikis"). Currently reviewing content in wiki now to identify what to migrate to new confluence site. No longer relevant content will be archived.
Make sure you let Bianca know if you want a login to the new site (crowleyb@si.edu).
New wiki should be available in late September. Look and feel will be different and process of getting new logins for private confluence wiki isn’t controlled by Secretariat. We will have to request new logins from SI staff. Might be longer wait period to get new logins.
Public Wiki
As you may have been in our last monthly highlights email, we’re in the process of migrating to new "About BHL" WordPress site hosted on Smithsonian servers. The site is expected to launch in August 2018.
All relevant content will be migrated over to the new site, and the Wikispaces site will be retired after new site launch.
New site will offer improved features and functionality, including a design to match the BHL website, easier built-in navigation, new FAQ and streamlined help services, consolidated tools and services page.
Thanks to Joel Richard for his work migrating the Wikispaces content over to the new site and Bianca for her work designing the new FAQ and Help centers.
We will send a follow-up email with more details and an anticipated launch date a week or so before launch. If you have any questions, contact Grace (CostantinoG@si.edu).
• New partners
Since April, two new partners have joined BHL as Affiliates: Lloyd Library and Museum in Cincinnati and Auckland War Memorial Museum in New Zealand. Latter will be working closely will BHL Australia to contribute content.
Technical Team (Carolyn Sheffield or Joel Richard)
• Full text search updates (Carolyn)
Some praise expressed from staff for FTS. Bianca has experienced problems with known title searching. There have been tweaks made recently – advanced searching changed from OR to AND searches (should help with precision for known title searching) and radio buttons added to advanced search to specify whether you want to search for words individuals or exact phrase (basically works same as quotes).
Also close to releasing further refinements to specify full text search or catalog search (i.e. only metadata search).
• Internet Archive updates and BHL harvest issues (Mike)
When anything in the BHL collection at IA changes, BHL’s harvest process must look at the item because it doesn’t know what has changed. IA is running an extra process to regenerate thumbnails and add identifiers, and in doing so have touched thousands of items. So, our harvester has to look at more items and the process is taking days longer. Hopefully after this weekend we will be back to normal. Last weekend’s harvest still not complete, but hopefully will be finished up in the next couple of days.
One harvest must complete before next can begin. So far that has not been an issue, but it might be a problem this coming weekend. If so, Mike will begin next harvest once this last one is complete.
Executive Council / Members
There are regular EC council and Member calls. Link in agenda will take you to meeting minutes.
Collections Committee (Bianca Crowley)
• 108,445 Total Pages contributed for June ==> lowest monthly total in 3 years likely due to the fact that the pan BHL scanning funds had been closed since November 2017. Special thanks to all BHL partners that have been able to sustain digitization through the generous contribution of their own funding sources.
• The BHL Collections Committee continues to discuss the future of e-content acquisitions to the BHL collection ⇒ Having content IN the BHL collection is always ideal so we can apply value-added service to all content, but it does require resources to upload this content through Macaw to BHL. Is it worth the resources if the electronic content is already freely available online? Our committee is reviewing various examples on a case by case basis to determine best practices for the future.
Cataloging Group (Diana Duncan)
The group met three times since last staff call. They are talking about Creator files and working on requirements for new data model that will go in with next version of BHL. Talking about issues like adding varying forms of names, multiple identifiers, notes for when someone does authority work, and storing dates in multiple ways (numeric dates needed but some have prefixes). We would like to consolidate creators for articles and monographs. Most articles have creator names with only first and last initials. There are also issues with variance with capitalization and punctuation for matching. Working on process to reconcile names for clean-up. Diana Shih working on some manual clean-up of some names and MJ Han (UIUC) has automated process to match names to VIAF database.
Project updates
• Field Notes (Bianca for Ricc Ferrante)
CLIR funded FNP has been completed. There is
summary blog post here. Adriana Marroquin was project manager. Now moved to new position with SIL.
FBP is still ongoing at Smithsonian Archives. Funded through Arcadia grant. Continuing to work on getting more fieldbooks into BHL. Working on transcriptions, trying to get new fieldnotes transcribed and submitting transcriptions to Mike for testing in replacing BHL OCR with transcribed text to come.
Send Ricc email (ferranter@si.edu) if any questions.
• NDSR (Update from Leora Siegel, Chicago Botanic Garden)
NDSR project is mostly finished. May 31 final date for reports to be completed. Harvard accounting still in touch about billing and invoices. All due to IMLS by end of August.
Link to final reports:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/eclb3aeduzjpcsh/BHLNDSR_imls_final_performance_report.docx?dl=0
Final time group met in person was at BHL Annual Meeting in LA. All in all, project was productive and worthwhile. All residents have found new opportunities, some in permanent positions, some looking at professional development and temporary positions.
Richard Hulser is no longer at NHMLA. Let Bianca know if you’d like to get in touch.
• EABL
EABL project still going on. Susan Lynch will provide update on EABL status on next call.
Round Robin (All)
• Is the every other month BHL Staff conference call schedule working? or not?
Tomoko prefers monthly. This is the place she can catch up with news. With bi-monthly structure, if you miss a call, there’s a lot more time in between until next call.
Alison supports the bi-monthly format.
Secretariat has found it easier to keep up with doing the calls every other month.
Going to every other month has meant we have fewer people on the calls. Fewer people could be because of summer vacations.
Review on current structure and possible changes will come by the end of the year.
Bianca will put out a call to see who wants to sign up for calendar reminders.
Otherwise, let Bianca know thoughts via email (CrowleyB@si.edu).
• Other Updates
Diana Duncan: Christine Giannoni has been promoted to head of all collections at Field. She is also still head of library at this time. Gretchen Rings and Melissa Anderson will be taking over digitization side of things at Field Museum Library.
Tomoko Steen: Library of Congress hosted the Teacher’s Institute this summer. Grace sent BHL promotional materials for distribution. It was a hit and they will use BHL for teaching.
Outreach Update (Grace Costantino)
Cornell Cider Campaign: In June, we celebrated apples and cider-making with Cornell University as part of the #CornellCider campaign, produced in conjunction with the annual Cornell Reunion and the opening of a new “Apples to Cider” exhibit at Cornell’s Albert R. Mann Library. BHL content focused on a new BHL Pomology collection created for the campaign. Learn more:
https://s.si.edu/CornellCider
BHL campaign content included #CornellCider-themed book of the month and BHL User blog posts. Learn how
BHL is helping Dr. Greg Peck identify enigmatic apple cultivars and
explore //The Herefordshire Pomona// (1876-1885), which documents the presence of over 400 apple and pear varieties in 19th century England.
Speaking of book of the month and BHL user posts….
- Please sign up for a book of the month slot. 2019 now open, and looking for December 2018 highlight as well: https://s.si.edu/BHLBlogSignUp
- I need candidates for people to interview for our BHL Users series: https://s.si.edu/BHLUsers. Please email me if you have candidates (CostantinoG@si.edu).
Next Call
Next call is currently not until September 20. August has a lot of travel and we will be in the midst of wiki migration. Better to wait until September for next call.
Office hours should be open on August 16. If you have BHL-related questions, Bianca will be available.
