bhlstaffcallnov152012
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NEW DIAL IN INFORMATION:
1-877-860-3058 passcode 961479
Agenda
- FYI $10K scanning money allocation (Bianca)
- FYI Digitization Project nomination form (Bianca)
- FYI BHL new UI development update (Tech Team)
- Discussion: Mission statement discussion (Matt Person)
- FYI IF TIME: BHL Projects and Initiatives (Bianca)
Notes below to be revised:
to be discussed today, as a vision statement:
Sparking Discovery Through Free Access to Biodiversity Knowledge
Notes for Mission Statement agenda item:
Current mission statement:
“The Biodiversity Heritage Library is a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries that cooperate to digitize and make accessible the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global ‘biodiversity commons."
Notes from BHL Mission Statement sub-committee:
On Friday, November 2, Diana Shih of AMNH, Clare Flemming of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Grace Costantino of SIL, and Matt Person of MBLWHOI met via conference call to discuss a final recommendation from BHL staff to the Executive committee for a revised BHL mission statement.
- This was a third step in this process:
The first two steps took place at the BHL staff meeting at the end of September in Cambridge, followed by an invitation to staff who were not at that meeting to participate in our mission statement word suggestions and voting process:
On the October Staff call we followed up with a full discussion of the results on our October staff call…which led to a number of suggested mission statements:
as a reminder, here are the elements involved in constructing a mission statement
Business:
Business describes what an organization does. We currently say that we “digitize and make accessible the legacy literature of biodiversity.”
Values:
Values describe what is important to an organization.
Audience:
Audience describes who we serve as an organization. We currently do not make a statement about audience in our official mission statement. The collections committee suggested “widest possible audience.”
Top Voting Results:
The top theme from the voting for Audiences centered around the concept of “everyone.” There were a total of 11 votes for this concept, described using a variety of particular words and phrases.
Top Business Votes
|
Top Values Votes
|
Top Audience Votes
|
Enhance/Spark Discovery
Empower
Digitize
|
Free/open (access)
Sustainability
Sharing
|
Humanity/Everyone
Researchers
Scholars
|
Below are 5 possible mission statements Staff contributed:
- The Biodiversity Heritage Library sparks discovery and empowers humanity by providing free, open access to digitized biodiversity literature.
- Sparking discovery and empowering humanity.
- Sparking discovery through digitized literature in a sustainable, open access environment.
- Empowering humanity through free, open access to digitized biodiversity literature.
- Sharing biodiversity literature with humanity.
On November 2, Grace, Diana, Clare, and Matt met to take into account the entire process and the results thereof described above, and attempted to synthesize a mission statement reflective of a solid understanding of who we are, what the library we work in is, and how it serves those who are our library community.
We agreed to concentrate on this statement:
The BHL Empowers humanity through free (digital/open) access to biodiversity knowledge.
And we weighed the use of certain terms such as humanity, free, digital, and open, as these had been discussed during the October BHL staff meeting, and we looked at some of the big vote getters such as
enhance,
spark, and
discovery, and after a 40 minute discussion we crafted the flowing statement:
The Biodiversity Heritage Library sparks discovery through free access to biodiversity knowledge.
We worked with this further, and edited it to read:
Sparking Discovery Through Free Access to Biodiversity Knowledge
We then, through email correspondence and one additional conference call fully critiqued, looked at alternative suggestions, took the above statement apart, replaced it with others, questioned where it fits within the domain of a textbook mission statement and discussed the expressed staff wishes, and also the helpful suggestion which had been given by the BHL Director during the mission statement exercise at the Cambridge meeting, to make the statement concise, direct, and "something you can say on the elevator" After all the above we agreed that the above statement is worth consideration as the BHL Staff suggestion for a mission statement, to the BHL Steering Committee.
Notes
Attendees: Alison, Bianca, Marty Joy, Don, Diana D., Matthew B., Diana S., John, Trish, William, Matthew P., Kevin, Becky, David, Suzanne, Keri, Daria, Joe
Bad echo on the call, Bianca to investigate this for future reference but for now, we'll have to work through it
Collections updates
- Everyone is OK with $10K scanning allocation recommendations
- Folks also OK with digitization form
- AMNH doesn't actually have any projects to submit to the form
- Marty and Don to see if the Seed Catalogs project could serve as an example to fit into the digitization project nomination form; Marty says some components will be impossible to fill out now but they'll give it a try
UI updates
- Simon Sherrin came to visit MBG in St. Louis for a three weeks in October to work on the UI and is back in Australia now
- New UI updates include new look, adoption of newer version of book viewer
- "Parts" of a book or journal (ie. articles, chapters, treatments), internally known as "segments," will be incorporated also.
- Unfortunately Simon had a family emergency that required him to leave work immediately ==> Beta testing delayed!
- Ely Wallis (of Museum Victoria, Australia and gBHL Chair) is looking to have someone in the meantime, (Ajay Ranipeta?) to fill in for Simon while he is gone.
- Beta testing was supposed to get going today but now delayed until the SUGGESTED date of Nov. 26 -- Ely needs to confirm the timeline, see BHL User Interface merge
- Still aiming for early January to launch the new UI but, of course, dependent upon getting new developer at Museum Victoria involved
- Simon is a developer with Museum Victoria, Simone is a designer
- What % of work has been completed? What's left to do? We're not sure yet, Ely to determine
- What tool should we use to do testing? Maybe we will use Bug Herd http://www.bugherd.com/
Mission discussion
- Matt P., Grace, Diana S., and Clare worked together to draft a mission statement, see their notes above as to how their process
- Development of mission statement has shifted, mission statement now a vision statement
- Vision statement (v. mission statement) is more of a tagline
- Group noted the objections to the mission statement, ie "sparking" not an appropriate word
- Other suggestions like "inspiring" "enabling" considered but "sparking" less traditional, formal
- what's the difference b/w a mission and a vision statement? vision is something you can put on a bookmark, fewest amt of words,
- some like "sparking" b/c non-traditional, catchy; now with statement as vision rather than mission it makes more sense as a PR statement
- thought "free access" communicated the change away from initial core audience as taxonomic community to mean everyone
- audience left out of vision in SIL work actually
- defining your audience can really help you with metrics, ie measure success
- an audience is better for a mission & goals
- Group has taken note on people's comments and will work on vision statement further; where goals & mission discussion go is TBD up to Grace and Martin
- So what will go on the homepage?
- Good to have short vision statement on homepage; About us page is more where we can put mission and more descriptive info -- TRS, Becky and Don agree
- William and Bianca think it would be nice to have something more descriptive about what the BHL is on the homepage
- Matt P makes the good point that the new UI should be self explanatory about what BHL is about, "a well designed UI explains what the site is about"
- Can we talk about "free access"? Open access v. free access -- free access is maybe redundant, does access always imply free?
- open access means that something is available, reusable, and not restricted by no non commercial reuse
- Free access is clear and to the point, Suzanne: "my mom could understand it"; things accessible are not necessarily free and it's good to state this; using open access is more jargony and we do have a non-commercial restriction
- sparking v. enabling v. inspiring >> isn't sparking incredibly exciting? What problems do people have with sparking?
- sounds like an ad; we're a bio site & sparking is a physical sciences term; it's not timeless; too trendy; sounds glib, not serious
- no need to use informal language such as this to widen the audience; this is branding BHL as non-serious which doesn't match with its content
- what about "bringing biodiversity knowledge to the world"?
- WU: taglines are for a campaign, these can change over time, current short statement akin to selling a product, a vision should describe how we look at ourselves in the future; tagline is a catchy phrase that goes with a product or company name, but people don't expect this to fit on the new UI as mission / vision, maybe more description is necessary for that.
- Matt P.: this call describes where we're at with the vision statement, we have people's comments, no big decisions at this time
- Grace and Martin to determine next steps for mission statement -- time table of presenting mission/vision to SC may move back esp. now that UI launch has also moved back
BHL Projects and Initiatives
- Bianca put chart together as follow up from discussions at BHL staff meeting; it was agreed at the meeting that we wanted one list to help us prioritize next directions for BHL
- Not a lot of time to discuss contents of the list itself, there's 90+ things! it's overwhelming!
- Methodology for putting list together described
- Some possible next steps outlined but Bianca needs help understanding where to go from here
- MANY THANKS to Trish, Don, and Alison for volunteering to help (and to Matt for encouraging folks)
