bhlstaffcalljun202013

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Agenda:

• Personnel updates (5)
• gBHL 2013 meeting update, see notes (10) - BHL Awesome!
• IA issues (15)
  • Changes to Wonderfetch see http://archive.org/details/PartnerMetaApp, IA mentioned reaching out to partners at end of May - did anyone hear from them about these changes?
    • Explanation by Gemma Waterston IA UK: "It won't work to just save the Wonderfetch sheet as a csv as there are lots of additional fields (column titles, etc) that are no longer needed. All we need is the metadata- by just using csv, we no longer have to worry about formatting, or formulas, or anything else that has bothered us with Wonderfetch. You can use much more than the 5 metadata fields listed in the example. Basically, you can put any field you want in that top row, and they will be loaded. All that is required is the metadata fields on the top row, and then each item's metadata listed on the following rows. PMA is actually going to be much more flexible for you- you can create custom metadata fields just by putting them in that top row. And once this sheet arrives with us, we will be able to load all of your items at once."
  • Page inserts issue - recap & resolution (Bianca & NYBG)
• New scanning allocation update (5)
  • Yellow in Spreadsheet
• Round Robin (25)
  • Anyone going to any conferences soon? Submitting any proposals for conferences?

Attending:

Grace Costantino
Bianca Crowley
Adriana Marroquin
JJ Ford
Jackie Chapman
Diana Duncan
Matt Person
Marty Schlabach
Alison Harding
Trish Rose-Sandler
Gilbert Borrego
Diana Shih
Gwen Henry
Joe deVeer
Chris Carden
Becky Morin
Matthew Bolin
Keri Thompson
Tomoko Steen
William Ulate
Suzanne Pilsk

Notes:

• Personnel updates (5)

Grace Costantino leaving BHL. New Program Manager Carolyn Sheffield (of Field Books Project) joining July 1, 2013. Grace documenting tasks for smoother transition.

JJ Ford rejoining BHL with Harvard HUH, coordinating digitization for BHL as of June 17. Working with Judy Warnement.

Adriana Marroquin, summer BHL virtual reference intern. Working to help manage scan request backlog with Bianca. Working on requests since late February. Interning with Robin at Smithsonian Botany Libraries, also spent time at Harvard Botany. Just graduated from Library School. Working closely with Jackie also on scanning requests.

• gBHL 2013 meeting update, see notes (10)

We met at Fez, Morocco, May 27-28, 2013

Attendees
Ely Wallis, Museum Victoria, BHL Australia, Global BHL Chair
Nancy Gwinn, Smithsonian Libraries, BHL-US/UK, Global BHL Secretary
Anne-Lise Fourie, SANBI, BHL-Africa
Jiri Frank, NM Prague, BHL-Europe
Jinzhou Cui, Institute of Botany CAS, BHL-China
Dr. Magdy Nagi, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, BHL-Egypt
Martin Kalfatovic, Smithsonian Libraries, BHL-US/UK, Program Director
William Ulate, Missouri Botanical Garden, Global BHL Project Coordinator

BHL Nodes Reports
BHL-US/UK - BHL AU-US-ome, Macaw
BHL-Australia – Volunteers work, will try to get technical person to support introducing others to Macaw.
BHL-Europe – Reactivating, solved ingesting performance, re-started ingesting content, proposal to CETAF (Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities)
BHL China - All Flora of China at the province level has been OCR’d so full-search text is available. New Portal. Chinese colleagues generating OCR and manually tagging common names. They want to link BHL literature to Species 2000 species names. Waiting for the rest of the content from MBL cluster. Future work to markup all genus and species of a family as pilot:species.
BHL Africa - New African Node, Installed Macaw at UP, about to start tests from Kenya to upload to IA
BHL-Egypt - Dr. Magdy Nagi, from Bibliotheca Alexandrina presented the new portal being developed by the Egypt team. (bhl.bibalex.org). It contained 6865 books then available by 5935 authors in 7 languages (now it shows more than 16394 books and grows daily). They will finish ingesting all BHL content in 2 months. Users with an account can have a bookshelf, bookmark, underlining capabilities, comparing, access private content, group content or public library.
BHL-Brazil - BHL-SciELO Brazil has completed development of converting the metadata from scanned journals into MARC 21 so the now can use Macaw to upload. They are currently experimenting with the Macaw version installed at Missouri Botanical Garden.

Portals
It was mentioned that a principle for gBHL could be that, at least for language with Roman characters, rather than a separate portal, an API could be developed in the relevant language to show the country’s content. This way, the problem of forking code that causes future functionality not to be synchronized would be avoided.
BLE
Jiri Frank presented on the BLE application, and many members were interested in creating collections.
Membership and Governance - No observations to the current by-laws were indicated.
DPLA
General discussions about making BHL content available in external aggregators.
WDL - Nancy suggested we could each node put 3 books into the World Digital Library.
Review Regional BHL Membership
Martin gave an example, of institutions and individuals who have expressed their interest to contribute, like Rusia, India and others. It was discussed that for some nodes, there was interest, for different reasons, to be part of another node rather than the Regional one. It was decided that the Executive Group could identify a subgroup to work on Global expansion.
Funding strategies at the different existing global nodes and options to support Global BHL activities
Nancy and William will coordinate a Survey tool to find out where the money is coming from and what the restrictions are.
gBHL-CC EC Elections
The Chair and Secretary will continue their turn. They have invited Jiri Frank to become the Vice-Chair. The decision was unanimous. He would participate in Meetings (calls) of the gBHL-CC EC.

Next Meeting tentatively in Australia in February.

Questions about global meeting, contact William Ulate [william.ulate@mobot.org]

• IA issues (15)

  • Changes to Wonderfetch see http://archive.org/details/PartnerMetaApp, IA mentioned reaching out to partners at end of May - did anyone hear from them about these changes?

    • Explanation by Gemma Waterston IA UK: "It won't work to just save the Wonderfetch sheet as a csv as there are lots of additional fields (column titles, etc) that are no longer needed. All we need is the metadata- by just using csv, we no longer have to worry about formatting, or formulas, or anything else that has bothered us with Wonderfetch. You can use much more than the 5 metadata fields listed in the example. Basically, you can put any field you want in that top row, and they will be loaded. All that is required is the metadata fields on the top row, and then each item's metadata listed on the following rows. PMA is actually going to be much more flexible for you- you can create custom metadata fields just by putting them in that top row. And once this sheet arrives with us, we will be able to load all of your items at once."

Bianca heard through Alison Harding that changes coming for Wonderfetch a few weeks ago. Since then Bianca has had email correspondence with Gemma Waterson and Jude of IA. Discovered that they're making changes to wonderfetch. Implementing new process that is supposed to be simpler: Partner Meta App. Has anyone else heard of this change?

Only SIL has heard of this. Daniel, IA scribe scanner at SIL, informed SIL that changes were happening. No one else knew.

• Bianca: I was told at end of May that IA was beginning to reach out to partners to communicate this change. Clearly they haven't. If they haven't reached out to us, do we need to make any changes on our end? If they want changes made, they should reach out to you. Typically I don't interact with IA. The only reason I heard about it was because Alison noticed a copyright problem that led to awareness of change. Other opinions?
• Keri: Agree to wait to take action. It's on them to explain to users how to use the new tool.
• Alison: We don't have to use new tool. We just have to set up new spreadsheet, but you can put anything you like in the spreadsheet.
• Suzanne: Looks like you can put anything you want, but we don't know where it's getting mapped.
• Keri: Yes, that's why they need to tell people how it works. They're assuming everyone's data is the same.
• Suzanne: Does Mike need to weigh in on the discussion. If we're proactive we can make sure we're sending them what we need to send them.
• Joe: We're using Wonderfetch and I've noticed that our copyright data is not getting ingested properly. I talked to our scribe and they corrected one shipment, but this is still an ongoing problem.
• Diana Duncan: We've noticed the same problem. The copyright metadata is right in IA, but not getting passed into BHL.
• Suzanne: So clearly IA changed the field that holds the copyright metadata, and Mike doesn't know where to pull the new copyright metadata from, so it's not showing up right. Tech committee needs to talk to IA to find out what's going on.
• Grace: Also need to make sure we can still use the Sponsor field, otherwise you can't tell IA who to charge the books to for the pan-BHL scanning process.
• Bianca: Jude is the person to talk to for technical discussions.

Bianca will involve tech folks in follow-up email to Jude about this discussion (William, Joe, and Mike). Include discussion about needing sponsor field. We would like a template for the data we need.

• Page Inserts

Bianca: NYBG brought this issue up. Has anyone else run into page insert issue with IA. Has anyone rescanned a page in house and asked IA to insert into the book?

No one else has done this. NYBG was told that IA is no longer allowing you to rescan pages yourself and add to books. Most people send books to IA for rescanning. SIL rescanned pages themselves occasionally but before publishing and through special process.

• Marty: If change made in IA items, does BHL recognize change and reingest?
• Bianca: Yes BHL accepts these changes if there are page level changes, but item or title level changes might not occur automatically.
• Grace: Pagination is not automatically updated in BHL if pages are inserted.
• Bianca: Jude now says that IA will allow page inserts from institutions, so maybe this is changing? If you want to try page inserts through your own scanning process, contact folks at NYBG for more details. Sounds like it is possible, though.

• Update from Mike Lichtenberg: No edits to IA are reflected back into BHL automatically. Mike must manually ensure that all desired IA edits are implemented in BHL.**

• New scanning allocation update (5)

25,000 being added to pan-BHL scanning contract. Think about what you want to start scanning. If rows in your spreadsheet are yellow, it means they've been updated with actual cost of book and it's an indication that we've actually paid for the books. DO NOT remove the yellow highlighting or change the cost indicated for those books.

• Round Robin (25)

Harvard Botany (JJ Ford)

Working on getting partner form and content agreement set up to start scanning with IA. Going through Judy's file of backlogged Gemini issues. 27 outstanding issues, and ones that we could be reassigned to. Should I reassign or wait for Jackie/Bianca to reassign?

Bianca/Jackie/and JJ can talk about issue reassignment offline.

MBL WHOI (Matt Person)

Not much to report. Celebrating 125th anniversary of MBL. I was with some historians who were using a BHL scanned volume written by Edwin Conklin, and using it in digital form and in real form, and the plates were drawings of slides that scientists had done in early 1900s. They had the actual volume, the BHL volume, and actual glass slides and a microscope. They were comparing what was in all three and planning to use heavy duty scanner to scan slides. I think it will eventually make a blog post.

Also sent email a couple of weeks ago about MBL WHOI merging with University of Chicago as long term affiliation. Puts MBL on better financial footing.

Cornell (Marty Schlabach)

Pushed 25 titles, 32 volumes into IA, which have since been ingested into BHL. First of content ingested into BHL since Cornell joined. Several other 100 volumes in pipeline that should be added to IA soon. Have set aside funding for additional scanning in coming fiscal year, so will continue in-house scanning.

Had conference call with Bianca to learn more about administrative dashboard, which was very helpful.

Field (Diana Duncan)

Just got last shipment back with one big folio volume. Probably not more money for scanning for a while.

NHM London (Alison Harding)

Next week last week for current IA scanner person. We have a new person, but will need training so slow to start. They have Gemma to oversee. Alison has volumes waiting for them when they come.

Going to European Birds Curator conference and thinking about giving short presentation on BHL. Any ideas or content would be welcome. We've done a lot of blog posts about ornithological topics that would be useful. Also plenty of ready available slide fodder. Let Bianca know if you need any slide fodder.

Alison having internal server errors with admin dashboard. Gilbert just talked with Mike this morning, and he supposedly fixed the error. Contact Mike with issues or go through Bianca. Bianca needs to update link on About page to go to new admin link.

Kew sent some items to NHM for scanning. The scanning hasn't been done yet because Kew has not agreed to the IA terms and conditions yet. They will work with Kew to resolve this.

Smithsonian (Gilbert)

Scanning at normal pace. Sending shipments to FedScan most weeks. Using mostly user requests for scanning.

Keri: MCZ and NYBG Macaw content is being loaded now.

Gilbert and Grace have a poster at ALA in a couple of weeks - power of crowdsourcing talking about Flickr work. Martin and Suzanne will post everything up and do all of the physical stuff for the poster, as Gilbert and Grace are not actually attending ALA.

AMNH (Matthew Bolin)

Have not received the books back from IA from our last shipment. Still waiting on that. Continuing QA with what they have had scanned and waiting for one load to be returned so they can collect for and send off for next shipment. Have not seen actual scanning facility yet, so working on seeing new facility through tour.

MCZ (Joe deVeer)

Going along well. Doing responses to Gemini requests - long queue. They are all in queue. Gwen working on that. Museum has agreed to support us for another year (FY14) for scanning. Harvard has its own Macaw installation now. Office for Information Systems contacted MCZ recently and said Macaw is ready to go. Still interested in central installation, but might be possible for MCZ to start uploading boutique scanned material into IA soon.

CAS (Becky)

Not too much happening. IA finally finished QA for giant failed shipments from several years ago. Close to wrapping up soon. At SLA last week and got to meet Jackie. Gave talk about BHL. Late in the day so not well attended but got lots of questions and interest in field book materials and interest in participating.

LoC (Tomoko)

Back after surgery but much going on. Roberta asked her to write a page about BHL collaboration for LoC newsletter. This summer participating in a workshop for teachers institute and Tomoko was asked to give presentation on August 6 about BHL. Working with Asian map experts with butterfly maps from 1800s. They might be able to add to IA for BHL.

Tomoko to send messages to the BHL Listserv about conferences she's interested in presenting at. Grace to send Tomoko content about BHL for posting to listservs.

MBG (Randy Smith)

Status quo. Doing Engelmann correspondence scans. Doing other book scanning slowly.

MBG Technical

Trish Rose Sandler: Proposal accepted for Missouri Library Association. Two proposals to submit: Digital History and Philosophy of Science (this fall) and Visual Resources Association (next spring).

Bianca, Connie, Trish working on proposal for digital library federation forum in fall.