bhlstaffcalloct182012notes

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October 18, 2012 BHL staff call Notes

Attendees:

Don Wheeler
JJ Ford
Bianca Crowley
Grace Costantino
Matthew Person
Stefaan Hurts
Diana Duncan
Gilbert Borrego
Michelle Abeln
Gwen Henry
Joe deVeer
Diana Shih
Matthew Bolin
Joy Paulson
Kristen Bullard
Clare Flemming
Sue Zwicker
Suzanne Pilsk
Nancy Gwinn

New Folks Introduction:

• Joy Paulson: From Mann Library at Cornell. Works closely with Marty Schlabach on digital library development. Works at Cornell on BHL submissions.
• Kristen Bullard: Natural History and Zoo librarian at SIL.
• Stefaan Hurts: Digital Imaging technician at SIL for BHL.
• Clare Flemming: At ANSP, archivist and present direct for library and archives.
• Sue Zwicker: New librarian with Natural History and SERC at SIL.

Staff Meeting Recap:

Bianca: The Staff Meeting occurred at end of Sept., 2012, at Harvard, MCZ. There were two tracks, staff and technical. All staff were together for news and updates and split up for specific discussions.

Highlights:

New Governance Structure: Established last March. 3 levels of membership: Institutional Council (all members); Steering Committee (10,000 in annual dues); Executive Committee (Nancy Gwinn, Chair; Connie Rinalso, Vice-Chair; Susan Fraser, Secretary)
BHL Secretariat: Martin Kalfatovic, Program Director; Bianca Crowley, Collections Coordinator; Grace Costantino, Program Manager
Technical Director & Global Coordinator: William Ulate

Financial Updates: Grace is managing BHL's finances. A initial allotment of $10,000 has been set aside in a scanning pool to pay for scanning at IA at BHL member institutions at the Steering Committee level. Scanning can hopefully begin by the end of this year or early next.

Technical Updates: We are upgrading our user interface. This will hopefully be done by the end of this year or early next. A colleague from BHL-Au is currently at MOBOT to help do this update (it involves migrating design from BHL-Au to BHL-US/UK). We will do testing with Staff after all features are in the Beta site. We have also developed a communication plan for communicating these changes to users.

Citebank will eventually migrate into BHL, but that's a more long term process to occur over the next calendar year.

NEH Art of Life project: Trish Rose-Sandler at MOBOT is in charge of this. The project is devoted to identifying and improving discovery of images in BHL. It builds on current Flickr work. Contact Biance, Trish, or William with technical questions.

Other Topics:
How to address Orange Bag issue - content scanned outside IA workflow - how do we get that content into BHL? Joel Richard at SIL has developed Macaw, a tool to help facilitate this process. Hopefully this tool can serve other BHL members. Joel is currently in MOBOT to hash out issues involved in Macaw development.

Staff Discussions:
Reporting and Outreach: Grace in charge of reporting. Take a look at meeting notes to see what forms you can use to give information about presentations, pagination, or calendar updates. If interested in helping with social media, contact Grace.

BHL Awareness Program: How can we help you get the resources you need to spread the word about BHL? Get in touch with Grace if you have questions/comments about this.

BHL Documentation Center: JJ Ford put together a new BHL documentation center. It is a collection of documentation about BHL. Linked from the internal wiki and "help" link in BHL dashboard.Contact JJ with questions.

Collections: Working on prioritization and analysis on content is in progress. If you have questions, contact Bianca.

BHL Projects and Initiatives: We discussed what the projects and iniatives we have for BHL are. Bianca put all identified projects and initiatives together into one list, and we decided that we should only maintain one list of all projects. If new project ideas come forward, they will be added to this list.

We also talked about mission and goals, which we will further discuss later on this call.

Questions: None.

Goals Follow-up Discussion:

Need to have Mission Statement first generally but goals not exclusively dependent upon having an official Mission before proceeding, want to keep momentum of discussions from staff meeting
To move forward with BHL Goals discussions in late December / early next year
Need for a working group to help JJ Ford to summarize goals and determine next steps
Volunteers: Matthew Person, Michelle Abeln
Thanks to JJ Ford for leading this discussion!

Mission Statement Discussion:

As discussed at the BHL Staff meeting there have been lots of changes in BHL over the past 5 years: new governance, personnel changes, new funding structure, changing scanning landscape, etc.
Our BHL Mission needs to be updated in light of these changes
And especially for the new user interface that BHL will be adopting at the end of this year / early next year
At the BHL meeting there were 3 brainstorming sessions w/ regard to: Business, Values, Audience
Sessions were 8 min ea. with a final voting period where people picked their top 3 words to represent BHL's Business, Values, & Audience
Grace tallied the results from the voting cards after the BHL Staff Meeting
Bianca sent out voting cards and gathered data from those who were not present during the Mission session to cast their vote
ALL results have been tallied and are gathered in the Mission Summary document (or see agenda)
Document provides a full summary of the results for each section (again, Business, Values, Audience)
The final section of the document summarizes the previous 3 sections, listing the top 3 words/phrases voted on to represent BHL's Business, Values, Audience

Business = Enhance/Spark Discovery, Empower, Digitize
Values = Free/Open Access, Sustainability, Sharing
Audience = Humanity/Everyone, Researchers, Scholars

Under this final summary Grace played around with the top voted words to suggest some potential DRAFT Mission statements
We need something shorter and sweeter than our 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'"

Need an "elevator speech"

Do the words/phrases for each section work? Are they appropriate?
Need volunteers to help come up with a final DRAFT to present to BHL Institutional Council (IC) for review

Discussion:
For Business: "Enhance/spark discovery" and "empower" are good words; 'Digitize" seems kinda hum-drum but is an important aspect of what we do
"Digitize" is about HOW we do it, not WHAT we do
Maybe "digitize" isn't as important to include in our Mission?
For a SHORT Mission statement, maybe "Digitize" is not so critical
"Digitize" could be a part of our goals
Some folks do think that "Digitize" is important because it clearly explains BHL b/c it IS about what we do, differentiates BHL from ILL service or other such library services
It's about capturing people's attention -- does "Digitize" do this?
Maybe it's just semantics, we could say that BHL Empowers humanity with the Digitization of...&etc, Empowering people by having digitized works...
Digitization will likely be covered in goals as well
Our business is about ACCESS!
Access could imply digitization
The concept of Digitization was exciting years ago, but now?...It's more a part of the general lexicon -- if we were vaporizing and reconstituting books now THAT would be crazy, wouldn't it?!
Users frustrated by lack of access, need to be careful b/c people don't immediately think of full and complete access when you just say "access"
Need to be clear that we mean access to the full and complete text &etc online
What about "biodiversity knowledge" do we like this phrase?
Yes, sounds good to most, but is this trendy?
OK, so what about values? Yes! Free/Open Access! BIG BHL Value
So what about this as a mission statement?:

"Empowering humanity through free, open access to biodiversity knowledge"

Could we make this shorter?
What about dropping "free"?
"open access" can be lingo-y, need to be careful
GW University mission: What we make is history
Make sure your mission can't translate easily to something else
What about the word "library"? "Library" often invokes the idea of traditional brick-n-mortar libraries, would "library" have a place in our mission statement?
could be redundant b/c "library" in our name
Would be good to differentiate ourselves from a brick-n-mortar library - how can we capture that we're a web-based library ==> "digitize"...

We need 3-4 volunteers to help Grace carry this discussion forward: Matt Person, Diana Shih, Clare Flemming
Thanks to Grace for leading this discussion!
Grace to schedule a conference call to discuss further soon
Other thoughts about our mission? Email them to Grace

Plan is to present a final draft on the next staff call

What about the action items from the BHL STaff meeting? We did not have time to review these so Bianca will send these out via email
Thanks to Becky, JJ, and William for getting the Action Items together

Do we like the idea of revamping our Mission and Goals? Yes!

Next call is 3rd Thursday of the month, November 15 at 11am ET.
Thanks all!