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Table of Contents

Agenda
Notes
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

Round Robin Updates / Open Discussion (All)
Grant Projects:
Committee reports:
Misc:
RECENTLY UPDATED
 IN PROGRESS
Guidelines for handling monographic separates and series records
 Correcting or Inserting Page Images https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_13rWZgjSsCCF-xOabi5ovOqOM7ju7Mn80F5omGPyzk/edit?usp=sharing

Notes


Outreach update (Grace)
Grace loves to highlight presentations on social media so don’t forget to let her know
Monthly highlights summarized each month which includes top posts for each social platform, check them out!

Round Robin Updates / Open Discussion (All)

Grant Projects:


Expanding Access has digitized 4,947 volumes, from 523 titles, amounting to over 541,000 pages. The project has added 150 in-copyright titles from 68 contributors. In total, 72 new contributors have been added to BHL through EABL (project goal is 100).

Susan Fraser, Susan Lynch, and Mariah will be attending CBHL in June, and they will be hosting a pre-conference workshop. Patrick will be presenting a poster at JCDL (Joint Conference on Digital Libraries) in June.

Richard Hulser (NHMLAC): In the next few weeks, our book for digitization as part of the EABL project should be finished and uploaded. We’re also working through getting the metadata cleaned up and article data added to our Contributions in Science series; we’re looking forward to working with Mariah on that.


The residents recently presented at the NDSR symposium. Carolyn was the mentor present. They also presented at DPLA fest and had a good session there with Trish and Leora as mentors.

Katie is going to the WikiCite conference in Vienna.
The residents have an ALA poster coming up this summer.
Lots of updates on their blog: https://ndsrbhl.wordpress.com/
Pam published a blog on user surveys: https://ndsrbhl.wordpress.com/2017/05/17/getting-to-know-the-bhl-users/
Katie did a blog on transcription: https://ndsrbhl.wordpress.com/2017/04/07/why-transcribe/
All together did blog post about experiences at DPLAFest and NDSR symposium on the BHL blog: http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2017/05/an-update-from-ndsr-residents.html
Alicia is making progress on doing gap analysis and general collections analysis for BHL.
The group will be meeting with the tech team in September where they will report the results of their work, as a preamble to doing the final report.

They are working together really well; they keep in touch quite consistently.

Bianca: Shout-out to Alicia and Pam who have been helpful for Collections Committee work.


Smithsonian Field Books Project (funded by Arcadia) is still digitizing and sending items through Macaw. 868 items have been digitized, with just under 700 already uploaded in IA and BHL. It’s about 1/3 of the overall digitization goals. We’re in the process of getting new cataloging and metadata contractors. The contracts have been approved, and we’re just working on credentials. Once that’s finished, we can increase our contributions.

The project was extended to continue through the end of the calendar year (it was originally slated to end in July).

Field Notes Project (funded by CLIR) involves multiple BHL and non-BHL partners. 350 items are digitized in BHL. This is just under 28,000 pages. A few more are in IA waiting for ingest. UC Berkley is in the process of converting records from MODS to MARC. The process has been started, so soon the items will be ingested into BHL.

Adriana gave a lighting talk at DPLAfest about these projects.

They were invited to submit a proposal for a panel discussion at DLF with other CLIR recipients. They will hear in July if they have been accepted.

Tomoko Steen (LoC): What’s the plan for the next special grant application? LoC was not able to participate in the last call.

Adriana: CLIR announces the next round of funding near the end of the year. As soon as we hear that they’re looking for more applications, we’ll send out an announcement for interest from BHL partners to participate.

Committee reports:


Connie Rinaldo (MCZ): Our last EC meeting was a couple of weeks ago, as people have been out of town. Nothing in particular to report. Next Member’s Call is next Thursday (May 25).

EC calls happen about twice a month and the Member’s Call is once a month.

Mike: On the title and segment admin pages, you can now enter DOIs that come from sources other than BHL.


There have been some questions surrounding access to the tech workspace in Gemini. You can access it here: http://biodiversitylibrary.countersoft.net/workspace/1352/items

Bianca: There are currently 89 issues on the tech team list. Some of these issues are big things, others are small. The tech team discusses this list monthly on the tech calls and prioritizes issues to work on.

Joel: We review the high and medium priority issues on the list and make decisions about which ones to focus on first. Low priority ones are reviewed as possible, but things are moving through process.

Mike: We’re trying to take a look at the newer items as well, regardless of priority. It’s not just high and medium priority issues being looked at.

Joel: The server for the full text search has been delivered from Dell, but Dell delivered two servers instead of one. We’re trying to sort out which is which. If all goes well, the servers should be at the data center next week and set up in about two weeks. Then we’ll decide how we move forward with full text search at that point.

How do you submit issues to the tech work space?
Submit a Gemini issue via the feedback button on BHL. Bianca will then assign to the appropriate tech list. The list collects suggestions and ideas for tech improvements, and they will be reviewed and decisions made when time allows.


Collections Committee notes: collectionscommittee
We’ve been talking about a variety of things:
Page redaction guidelines. Bianca got some volunteers from last staff call to work on those guidelines.
Additionally, the committee is talking about ideas for how we might want to develop a BHL ILL process.
We talked about the different NDSR projects related to the collections group (such as collections analysis). We’ve also identified some collections and contributor browse change requests (Pam helping with those), which we will work to add through Gemini.
We talked about monographic series. Many libraries hold similar collections but they’re cataloged differently. The committee is talking about strategies to handle these records and the possibility to enhance the user experience in understanding what these series are made of. Can we insert a bibliography of sorts to help? Should we think about providing access to these materials in BHL or via BHL in some way? These are things we’re exploring.



Susan Lynch: Jackie Chapman will be doing the diacritics correction work at Smithsonian.

Bianca: Would you be open to having other partners join the cataloging group? I was thinking about sending out a heads up to folks who might not be aware of the group (through partners listserv) to see if they might want to be involved.

Susan Lynch: Diana Duncan (Field Museum) and MJ Han (UIUC) are in charge of group, but it’s a very inclusive group, and I think they’d be happy to have others.

Bianca: Some of the feedback from the members was that some international partners might not be aware of the different committees or that they’re open to additional participants, so I want to make sure that’s well known. I will also be sending out an invite re: collections committee.

Misc:


Gemini stats available in the BHL Reporting doc: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KtbC_d5rlUzXRBQw1siFWhOVSs5dmjrYLMDahEZSaKo/edit#gid=1

New issues in April compared to previous months was low – about half compared to previous months. About 50% of the issues come in from BHL staff. Still over 2,000 issues open, but we had a decrease from 2140 to 2120 issues open this month compared to last month.

Susan Lynch: What is a special handling issue?
Bianca: It’s a component used to signify if a book cannot be digitized through the standard IA scribe process, but requires boutique scanning. It’s typically for rare materials. The component started before we had Macaw. It could highlight scanning requests that couldn’t be fulfilled because we didn’t have Macaw. It means extra effort needs to go into scanning these materials. Members wanted us to keep track of them specifically because of the extra work they entail.


Heads up that the help wiki is a work in progress – documents linked here are the most up to date versions of these documents. When you have a question about something, go to this page first and take a look at the documents and make sure there haven’t been changes since the last time you looked at it. Make sure you’re getting the most up to date document.

Bitly Update
For Smithsonian network users, there has been a sudden and immediate prohibition against the Bit.do URL shortener. If you’re on the Smithsonian network, you can’t use that shortener anymore. If you’re not on Smithsonian networks, this is not affecting you.

Grace and Bianca decided to make a switch to a different URL shortener. SI has an enterprise version of the Bitly service. It has been customized to s.si.edu. This is what we will be using henceforth. We are in the process of updating the existing shortened URLs. The effect right now is only on Smithsonian folks, so it’s not a high priority for us to update all links at this point. Going forward, we will use the new convention with bitly.

Metadata Requirements
Bianca: We are in the process of updating documentation for metadata. It now includes a new tab for cataloging different kinds of best practices. The Collections Committee has been talking about monographic separates and we wanted a place to document our decisions. So it was placed in the metadata document.

Page Inserts/Corrections
There is an in-process document on the page insert process (to insert skipped pages in digitized books): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_13rWZgjSsCCF-xOabi5ovOqOM7ju7Mn80F5omGPyzk/edit

This document is a draft outlining the different steps in the process, what you need to do, and what needs to happen afterwards. It also outlines what you don’t do for page insertion.

Mike: The main takeaway – don’t start full pagination until all manual adjustments have been done to the item. Skipped pages happens relatively often for BHL items.

Diane Rielinger (Harvard Botany): We often paginate as we QA. We might be partially paginated before we notice missing page.

Mike: Just stop paginating once you notice the skipped pages. You probably won’t have gone beyond the pages that are affected, so stop and wait to continue pagination until the manual correction portion is complete.

Send Bianca any questions or suggestions you have on these and other documents.