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bhlstaffcalljun2017

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Table of Contents

Agenda
Notes
Lead: Carolyn Sheffield
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

Round Robin Updates / Open Discussion (All)
Grant Projects:
Committee reports:
Misc:

Notes

Outreach update (Grace)

Round Robin Updates / Open Discussion (All)

Alison Harding: At NHM London, we are working on a project where we have a list of 250 pre-1800 journals, and we want to know if they’re in BHL. I’m wondering if there’s a quick way to search for those item on BHL, rather than having to manually search for each one.

Jackie Chapman: There’s probably not a way to easily check whether these items are in BHL. SIL is doing similar work, and we’re having to check both BHL to see if it’s been digitized as well as Gemini to see if someone is working on it.

Alison: I thought we could possibly download the entire title table, alphabetize it, and then search for items in the spreadsheet.

Jackie: That could work. You could possibly download a similar list from Gemini and search that way.

Susan Lynch: Do you have OCLC numbers for the items?

Alison: Unlikely, but I can look into it.

Susan Lynch: Potentially that could be an easier way to search for the items.

Grant Projects:

5,200 volumes added from 567 titles to BHL as part of EABL. This is about 565,000 pages. We’ve also secured permission for 158 titles from 71 contributors. The NYBG component of EABL was at the CBHL annual meeting, where they ran a pre-conference workshop. Patrick will be attending the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries next week and presenting poster on EABL.

New EABL blog post up today: http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2017/06/the-southern-cultivator.html

Carolyn: As a reminder , use the BHL presentations form to let us know about any presentations you’ll be doing for BHL: Presentations+Posters%2C+Papers+Form


The residents regularly blog about their work on the BHL NDSR blog. Be sure to check it out for great project updates: https://ndsrbhl.wordpress.com/

Katie went to WikiCite conference. See her recent blog post about the conference: https://ndsrbhl.wordpress.com/2017/06/06/the-role-of-librarians-in-wikidata-and-wikicite/

Pam at SI is working on user survey for BHL users. The survey is currently under review by NDSR partners, and will be released soon. Later, she will be doing surveys for BHL partner staff and system users.

Alicia has been using the JSTOR TopicGraph tool for some collections analysis. She showed some of this work recently to the Collections Committee.

The NDSR group has bi-weekly meetings. In September there will be the tech meeting in St. Louis that the residents and mentors will be attending. They will be discussing various things related to how work that’s been happening fits into tech committee work and what is and isn’t feasible.


Arcadia Smithsonian Field Book Project: Project has hired cataloging contractor, who has started cataloging, picking up where Lesley Parilla left off.

The grant period has been extended through June 2018.

1,461 items cataloged (73% of goal). 898 fieldbooks digitized for this project (35% of goal). There are just under 700 items already available in BHL, and a few are in line to receive page level metadata in Macaw.

CLIR BHL Field Notes Project: Ends in January 2018. 100,338 pages digitized (22% of goal). 2,147 items digitized. Just under 35,000 pages published in BHL (8% of goal). 402 items published in BHL. There are still a handful of items from UC Berkley that they need to test out MARC records for before they can be ingested into BHL, but they are available in the BHL IA collection.

Committee reports:


See the minutes linked in the agenda.

Members call update from Carolyn: It was a banner month for BHL donations from mid-April to mid-May. We raised $855 for individual donations to BHL. During the call, Martin also provided updates on recent presentations. Connie provided updates on meetings, including some with institutions that are pursuing partnerships with BHL.


Susan Lynch: Joel Richard prepared a report to be shared on the call. The contributor field in the portal has been re-labeled as “holding institution.” The request came from Bianca and one or more BHL committees. The reason for the request was that the term contributor was confusing to some people. Gemini ticket 58391 discusses the work that was done, if anyone wants to explore further: http://biodiversitylibrary.countersoft.net/workspace/219/item/58391. There are no changes to the partner metadata app as a result of this work.

Full text search work continues. There was difficulty ordering and obtaining the hardware required (server), but the server has arrived at Smithsonian and is being installed this week. Once installation is complete, Mike and Joel will customize the server for full text search. It will initially be connected to the beta site rather than production site as development occurs.

The tech team also talked about the latest OAI resource sync. There was a recent update to the OAI-PMH protocol. BHL currently uses OAI-PMH. We are a server and also act as a client. BHL uses the protocol to harvest from DSpace at AMNH. We may harvest using this protocol from other locations as well. Based on info available, we believe we don’t immediately need to support the replacement protocol, OAI resource sync, but if anyone knows of a reason to support immediately, please let the tech team know.

The tech team spends 1 week each month focusing on the Gemini workspace (see link above). They meet weekly, and one call each month is about reviewing the tickets in that workspace.


Alicia Esquivel: The link is available for everyone to look at. We’re interested in figuring out how we should move forward with this relationship with JSTOR Labs and what we want to use from this tool. It might be interesting to make visual analyses available to users as a way to browse the collection. Let us know of other ideas and thoughts you have about the tool.


Mai Reitmeyer: About uncropped pages, does IA do the cropping for you instead? Do they charge the fee to do this?

Joe deVeer: Those images will be uploaded via Macaw so they won’t be cropped by IA at all. In Harvard’s case, imaging services sends JP2s to Joe, and previously he was cropping these and then sending via Macaw to IA, but it was very time consuming and he was getting a backlog. Now he’s just sending uncropped images and IA makes the derivative files but doesn’t do other changes like cropping. Joe will add examples for the group to browse.

Mai: There are things that we haven’t scanned because we’re not able to crop effectively, so these examples might tell us if we can scan these things with uncropped images.

Susan Lynch: Harvard images are a special case because even though they’re not cropped, the margins are narrow. Most partners with uncropped images have wider margins, and those are less attractive than what Harvard is doing.

Mai: Perhaps BHL (maybe Collections Committee?) can issue some guidance on acceptable margins?

Joe: I think this is open for discussion. We did discuss uncropped images quite a bit on the Collections committee, but we didn’t discuss in detail the acceptable width of margins. Might be something we can add to documentation, as I don’t think there’s anything in the imaging standards about these guidelines at this time.


Due to a technical glitch, we were unable to have a call this week. Some in the grop are hoping to meet at ALA next week. If you’re going to be at ALA, let Diana know and maybe they can find a time to meet.

Misc: