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bhlstaffcalljun2016

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


June 16 Staff Call Notes


Becca Greenstein - Jackie Chapman’s intern at Smithsonian Libraries. Continuing Robin and Jackie’s earlier research project on fern literature in BHL. We’ll hear more about her work at the end of the summer.

Gretchen Rings – fairly new reference and ILL librarian at the Field Museum.

Elizabeth Debeljak – Library technician at Canadian Museum of Nature. Does acquisitions and cataloging. CMN just joined as Affiliates of BHL.


Matt Person, MBLWHOI – Jen Walton now one of co-directors at MBLWHOI Library (on MBL side). Diane Rielinger worked on BHL for many years but recently left MBL and is going on to other things. Lisa Reymond remains co-Director on WHOI side of library.



National Museum, Prague officially joined as Affiliate today. Martin and Connie at signing ceremony in Prague now, and we’re announcing their new Affiliation on social media today.

Notes from monthly Members call on wiki – you can look up notes to see Member updates: Meetings+and+Conference+Calls

We also announced Canadian Museum of Nature joining as an Affiliate through social media a couple weeks ago. We announce new Affiliates also in quarterly blog posts, which cover all new Affiliates in previous three months. Next post will come out July 7, and will include new Affiliates since April.


Mike: Martin now hoping to have move to SIL completed by August 1. Still in holding pattern with privacy office to approve switch to happen. All BHL database and website content will be switched from Missouri Botanical Garden (MBG) over to Smithsonian Libraries (SIL) servers. Right now the SIL privacy office is still reviewing the content, and we can’t complete the switch until the privacy office gives the go-ahead.


We found out that there is a diacritics problem whenever we upload non-English content into IA that have Marc records encoded in MARC-8. The tech team spent several months working with IA to determine the problem. We determined the problem is at IA. We got a fix late last week and some preliminary testing has been done at SIL. Testing has been successful so we’re feeling optimistic. Additional testing will occur and then once we fix the problem for new content, we’ll switch our focus over to how to correct content that is already messed up in IA and BHL. Susan and others are working with Jude at IA to come up with plan for how to fix existing issues. We can probably fix content in IA automatically and generate reports that will allow Members to fix content in BHL manually. But all of this is just preliminary and still need to work out details.


We’re adding new info to BHL’s interface to help describe copy-specific information. This is especially good for rare materials where we may want to have local notes or specific details about a particular book or volume displayed in user interface. We’re getting together a set of guidelines for folks about how to enter this information in the future. Bianca is also working with Mike on how to get this field displayed. We do have a field in the database that we can use, it’s just not surfaced yet. First request is to surface the field, then the next work will be to populate it.


Diana Shih: No updates from the group this call.

Bianca: Heads up to cataloging folks – I have an intern working with me and Lesley Parilla at The Field Book Project on portal editing things for BHL. She’s noticed some cataloging issues so there may be additional issues in Gemini coming up for the cataloging group to review.


Feedback management group came out of recommendations at 2015 Staff Meeting. This group came up with some recommendations for how we can move forward with user feedback. The plan was that the group would come up with a plan that would be provided to the Members at the Members meeting. The Members would then decide how to proceed. Members still mulling over what to do. In the meantime Bianca is performing triage for Gemini. The Feedback management group disbanded in April.

BHL user feedback management continues to operate under limited staffing resources. The Feedback Coordinator role has been reduced from ~60% FTE (Jackie Chapman) to now 10% FTE (Bianca Crowley). In this reduced role, Bianca is triaging all non-scan-request issues received from users. Scanning requests are being ignored. Bianca would like to open up the scan request pool to BHL Staff to review as time allows.

Questions/comments from users related to technical issues are being assigned to the Technical Advisors (Martin Kalfatovic, Carolyn Sheffield, Joel Richard, Mike Lichtenberg and Susan Lynch) for follow up and periodic review as part of their weekly meetings.

All emails to feedback@biodiversitylibrary.org are now automatically submitted as issues into the Gemini system.

Library of Congress, Cornell, Harvard Botany, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, and Smithsonian Libraries have helped answer general reference inquiries in the past couple months (thank you!). Bianca will continue to experiment with strategies to distribute questions/comments to BHL consortium partners for follow up where possible.

As yet, no additional triage support in place if Bianca is on leave. Current backlog of new issues at 8 that are more than 1 week old (as of 6/16/16).

No resources available to monitor issues that may stall or go unanswered. 1,779 issues remain outstanding across the Gemini system.

Scanning requests used to be processed just like any other issue. Since Bianca only does about 4 hours a week on Gemini, she doesn’t have time to triage scan requests. Right now new scanning requests are going into their own workspace and being ignored.

Countersoft charges $150/hour for "implementation support." This service is under consideration as a possible means of streamlining the system to make it easier for BHL Staff to interact with issues. For example, it would be worth exploring what options there are that might allow BHL Staff to post comments and perform necessary tasks assigned strictly via email (rather than having to log into yet-another system).


Bianca thinking about opening this pool up to everyone in a similar way to the portal edit queue workspace. Everyone has a workspace in Gemini for the portal edit queue. If we open up the scan request pool, whenever anyone logs into Gemini, they would also see and have access to the scan request pool, where they culd go through it as time allows or when they have need to find new things to digitize.

Tomoko: I think that’s good. Tomoko’s intern may also be able to help out with scan requests. She will talk with Bianca offline.

Pat: I think this is a good idea.

Jackie: I think this is a great idea for a short-term solution, but I would like to urge the Members not to consider this a long-term solution, as I think it might result in the bulk of the scanning requests falling on a small group of institutions.

Bianca will plan to open up the scan pool to everyone. If anyone disagrees, please email Bianca. We can evaluate how it’s working on future staff calls.


Bianca: I started sending reference questions received through Gemini to the listserv, and it seems to be working out well. Does everyone else think that’s a good idea?

Randy: I think this is a good solution, because it will get quicker, more immediate response.

Tomoko: I was very impressed with how quick people were to responding to the issues. I think it’s great.

Susan: I think what you’re doing may result in some duplication of effort. This seems to have happened in a couple of cases.

Bianca: I think this is a good point. I’ll need to consider this to think about how to reduce that duplication of effort. I’ll go ahead and keep trying this approach and try to find a way to make it clearer who’s on the issue. But you can also “claim” the issue by assigning yourself to the issue linked in the email.

Tomoko: If you want to put together a report for the Member’s group with a list of issues we still have with the system, I’m happy to help work on the report.

Bianca will follow-up with Tomoko on that.


Mariah: At the end of May, Patrick Randall and Mariah Lewis went to the CBHL annual meeting and presented on the Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature grant. They had a good response to the presentation. There’s a blog post about the presentation today: http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2016/06/expanding-access-and-mibio-team-members.html.

There are currently 1,189 volumes added to BHL as part of EABL, which is over 120,000 pages. About a dozen publications are on standby to be uploaded. Some are in process of being scanned. This includes 29 contributors and 46 in copyright titles secured for permission. We’re now 4 away from reaching the grant’s in copyright title goal, which is thanks to Patrick Randall’s work.




Joe: National Digital Stewardship Residency. Grant entails six institutions that will host 5 residents, recent graduates from library school programs, to work on an aspect of BHL. The institutions are: Harvard MCZ, Chicago Botanical Garden, the Field Museum, Natural History Museum Los Angeles County, Missouri Botanical Garden, and Smithsonian Libraries. It’s still early days for the project. The official start day was June 1. The group has been having monthly meetings – 3 calls so far. For first year, until end of December, we’ll still be in the planning phase, which will include setting up a project website and doing hiring on residents. Residents should be on board by Jan. 1, 2017, and will continue until Dec. 31, 2017. We’ve been trying to figure out logistics in the meantime. It’s complicated because residents will be Harvard employees but will be dispersed across the country. IMLS also wants to make sure we hire with diversity in mind and address sustainability and evaluation issues. We have also purchased a 6 person subscription to Lynda.com (training facility) to provide training for project management and mentoring for various administrators on the grant.


Anyone given any recent presentations?

Richard Hulser – I was just at the SLA meeting – were some presentations that mentioned BHL. Richard will talk with Grace about how to record them.

Elizabeth Debeljak – We at Canadian Museum of Nature will likely be doing presentations about our participation in BHL in the near future. We will start with staff internally and then branch out to let other people in the region know what BHL is and how we’re contributing.

Jackie Chapman – I’ll be doing a poster presentation at the Library Assessment Conference this fall. Poster will talk about work Becca and I are doing and the work Robin and I did last summer.

Trish Rose Sandler – I will be doing a BHL presentation for the IFLA conference in Columbus, Ohio during a one-day symposium before the conference on image access and discovery. They want to know what we’re doing related to image discovery and also about BHL as an international consortium. Let Trish know if you will be there.

Richard Hulser – I also recently gave a presentation at NHMLA about treasures at the library. I did discuss what we’re doing with BHL and asked how much people are using it. We’re beginning the process of examining the collection to see what would be wanted for digitization. I also did propose a paper for Internet Librarian (celebrating 20th anniversary in October) that was accepted. Part of it will talk about all the work at MBG on BHL. Richard will get in touch with Trish about it.

Need to give a presentation about BHL? Want to use the BHL template so that it’s branded BHL? Download it here:
http://bit.do/BHLTemplate


Also available under the “Branding and Style Guides” section of the documentation center on the wiki: Help

First slide provides instructions for how to use the template. Note: In the Google preview for the template, you’ll see formatting issues. These are only visible in the Google preview. Once you download the template and open in Powerpoint, these issues will not appear.


Bianca has updated documentation on the public wiki about easier ways to get single page full resolution JPEG images from BHL. Take a look at linked instructions. The Page IDs are available on the screen but might not be in the browser navigation bar, per se. You need to look for the page ID underneath the page metadata section on the left-hand side of the screen.

You can also get JPEG2000s images. Check out public wiki to find out how: http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Download+How+To.