bhlstaffcallmar2015
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Dial 1-877-860-3058 and enter the passcode 961479
Lead: Bianca Crowley
Notetaker: Carolyn Sheffield
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.
Agenda
- Round Robin (all)
- How's Macaw treating you...anyone experiencing slowness with Macaw uploading?
- Reminder: IA Partner Meta App and copyright metadata (Bianca)
- Recap of Members Meeting (Bianca et al)
- Gemini update (Jackie)
- Current status:
- There are currently 1329 open issues in Gemini (up by 54 since last call)
- 110 new issues have come in since the last call (up by 41 since last call), 60 of which are still open
- 82 issues have been closed since the last call (down by 13 since last call)
- Praise highlight of the month:
- "This is a great service. It's been a very big help in tracking down books and papers that normally are available only in certain specialist libraries. Many thanks for doing this. The site is very easy and intuitive to use. Fantastic."
- Quick Garden Stories campaign update (Grace)
- BHL Staff Meeting will be in Washington DC on... (Bianca)
Minutes
Attending
Bianca Crowley, Carolyn Sheffield, Diana Duncan, Grace Costantino, David Iggulden, JJ Ford, Jackie Chapman, Matt Person, Joe DeVeer, Randy Smith, Donald Wheeler, Matthew Bolin, Martin Kalfatovic, Suzanne Pilsk, Marty Schlabach, Diana Shih, William, Keri Thompson, Leora Siegel, Connie Rinaldo, Joel Richard, Alison, Cathy Buckwalder
Round Robin
Diana Duncan (Field): Field signed MOU as full Members! Just hosted the meeting. Catalog is now
OCLC Worldcat Local; got shipment back and now in BHL so the workaround we set up is working;
Diana will document in case it’s useful for others. Not using Macaw.
David Iggulden (Kew): Not much to report. Not using Macaw.
JJ Ford (HUH): Just sent a 3-cart shipment with MCZ last week. Lately, haven’t been using Macaw but will resume in about a month since wrapped up grant project. It was working well last time they used it.
Jackie & Keri (SIL): Status quo. Mostly scanning permissions titles. Stopped sending to FedScan, only scanning on local scribe. Had intermittent problems with things not getting to IA but was on IA end, but that’s been solved.
Matt (MBLWHOI): Doing well, not much to report. Continuing the tweeting including BHL promotion. Not using Macaw
Joe (MCZ): Going well. Macaw – haven’t experienced any slowness lately, but haven’t been using it as much. We use it to upload material scanned in-house, and the files tend to be large. There were a number of books that would make it to IA but wouldn’t make it to BHL. Investigated with Mike and found that images were too large; had to resize. Not sure what the size limit was. Cut down to 12MB each and that worked. Sent shipment, 1 of the 3 carts that went out. Joe to send Bianca an email to follow up.
Randy (MBG): Nothing new to report. Not using Macaw (they've always had in-house upload process via
Botanicus).
Don (NYBG): We have a small shipment in the conservation lab. Hopefully it will go out by the end of the month. We’re using Macaw and there were some problems with slowness. Susan had contacted Joel about some files that weren’t being handled well. Files coming in at 16-bit color depth, handling now in Macaw. Continuing to upload images from Seed & Nursery Catalogs to flickr, and training volunteers on paginating.
Diana & Matthew (AMNH): Getting another batch ready to send to IA. Macaw, no slower than usual. In process of starting QA on the last cart we got back from scanner.
Joel Richard (SIL): working on collecting statistics on upload speeds for Macaw at various remote locations.
Marty (Cornell): Most of our focus is on Purposeful Gaming, Seed & Nursery digitization, scanned 20,000 pages another 6,000 pages ready to go. Recently first use of Macaw, Susan Lynch at NYBG a great help. Some of our catalogs are now in BHL. We’re also participating in the social media campaign for PG. We have a process in place for in-house scanning of special collections materials, so ok to refer scan requests for those to us now. Gave a presentation on BHL on Seed & Nursery Rochester Seminar on heirloom gardening. Marty will tweak slides and then add to our list. Also, made (gorgeous!) bookmarks and postcards from that. Quickly picked up at the event and at the Annual Meeting. Can
find the files on BHL’s pinterest.
Leora (CBG): slowly coming along; tested IA and used Macaw and got one volume into BHL, was a little bit slow.
Volume 1 of 18 volumes of female illustrator, Helen Sharp. Jumping into Gemini next...
Alison (NHM): Tabletop scribe arrived! Chris ? IA Manager at Wellcome Library organizing some training for volunteers who will be doing scanning. Haven’t used Macaw in awhile but was slow. Have been in touch with Joel and will try again.
Cathy (ANSP): haven’t started with Macaw yet. Big project where we merged online catalog with Drexel and that’s going well, same items in there. Shipment out via BHL FedEx to SIL and once that comes back we’ll send another out.
Discovery Tools Working Group
Adam Chandler leading the group, there’s a poll on the wiki page, trying to get all of our ducks in a row for discovery layers for integrated BHL metadata into your catalogs. The goal is that we get all this figured out before our group concludes.
Discovery layers that we’re looking at include OCLC, Proquest Summon, EBSCO, Ex Libris. Amy will be our initial contact at DPLA. If there are any other aggregators you think we should be looking at, please let us know.
Connie: Are we still working with Europeana? Is it refreshed?
Martin: The feed is tied up with a larger way they ingest with BHL Europe; answer is unclear but not up to date. Not looking into this yet.
Marty: Just looking at metadata? Discovery tools, Summon and others harvest full text and make that searchable across disparate tools.
William: We’re not there yet. Some mentioned that they would like that added, but we’re just looking at we’re able to provide at this point.
Partner Meta App
Copyright metadata is not getting put in appropriate place for some recent scans.
Take a look at the documentation
Partner+Meta+App
We all have to use exactly what is shown there.
Use lowercase only and field column values exactly as written: "possible-copyright-status"
Otherwise, it won’t map to the appropriate field in IA and therefore not in BHL. So we have to be really diligent so it won’t be lost. Copyright statements are available on wiki as well.
Members’ Meeting recap
We invite you to ask your directors any questions you might have about any of the sessions. Overall, the meeting went well with lots of interesting presentations, especially the one from Dr. Matt Von Konrat and his work on bryophytes.
Martin: The meetings went very well. We had a very good attendance. Those who couldn’t come did send reports that we were able to share. It was very good for the directors to be able to hear from Bianca, Grace, and Carolyn.
Day One was a more open meeting with about five non-BHL attendees. We were hoping for a bigger group but encountered some logistical issues. The second half of Day One was for Members and Affiliates and we did a round robin of updates from each institution.
We also scheduled next year’s annual meeting at NHM-London and Kew. That will be our 10th Anniversary meting so we want to do some special things and we’ll be making calls for suggestions on how to celebrate.
Day Two was the BHL Business Meeting. The Members approved the 2015 Dues Spending Plan. A revised Strategic Plan is being drafted. One of the key things as part of the Bylaws and new MOU, there was an addition to our mission statement. The goals are staying the same. The revisions include some tweaking underneath the goals.
There was also some discussion on how to belong to BHL, what it means for nodes, Affiliates and Members.
The new Executive Committee was elected:
Nancy E. Gwinn (Chair), Constance Rinaldo (Vice Chair), and Jane Smith (Secretary)
Gemini Update (Jackie)
Thank you to those who are closing their issues. Still several open. Please take a look at what has been assigned to you, and especially make sure you are responding to users for those marked reference. It’s important that we’re timely with those.
Garden Stories (Grace)
Many thanks to all who have helped spread the word. It’s been distributed all over the world. Check out the links, blog post and flickr images. Also, we’ve set up a TFund (link in agenda). March 20 is the twitter chat.
Staff Meeting (Bianca)
Washington, DC will be the location and will be held sometime in November. Will send out a Doodle poll, looking at possibility of a 2-Day meeting either the week of Nov 9 or Nov 16. Do those sound reasonable? Any major conflicts?
Nov 11 is Veterans Day.
Martin: 9 and 10 November, Board meetings at SIL, logistical things that might conflict.
November 16 week
This will be an opportunity to do hands-on training.
Generally easier if it’s not in the middle of the week.
Attached to a weekend for people coming from a distasnce allows folks to arrive earlier or stay later if they want to.
For Staff Meetings, we would like to provide some level of support for one staff person from Member institutions. We won’t be able to cover full cost but some level of support. Stay tuned on how that will be done. Encouraged to send as many staff as make sense.
