bhlstaffcalloct2015
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Staff calls main page
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
- Roll call - if you are new to the call, please introduce yourself and welcome! (Bianca)
- Round Robin - Digitization status update (all)
- BHL Staff Meeting Nov 12-13
- Gemini (Jackie)
- Gemini Status: There are now 1558 open issues in Gemini, down from 1578 on our September call.
- We closed 90 issues since our last call - thank you!
- 74 issues have been created since our last call, 50 of which are still open.
- We've had another more 'normal' month down from recent highs of 111 for our July call and 189 for our May call.
- Pagination stats - "incomplete" (978) and "in progress" (188) (Keri)
- Fossil Stories. Have you been following?! http://biodiversitylibrary.org/collection/FossilStories
- Disqus Launching on BHL on Oct. 19.
- BHL Training presentation
Notes
Attending
Bianca Crowley (SIL), Carolyn Sheffield (SIL), Grace Costantino (SIL), Joe (MCZ), Martin Kalfatovic (SIL), Diana Shih (AMNH), Marty Schlabach (Cornell), David Iggulden (Kew), Matt Person (MBLWHOI), Randy Smith (MBG), Suzanne Pilsk (SIL), Keri Thompson (SIL), Richard Hulser (NHM-LAC), Susan Lynch (NYBG), Joel Richard (SIL), Don Wheeler (NYBG), Trish, Mike and William (MOBOT); Daria Wingreen-Mason (SIL), Jackie Chapman (SIL)
Round Robin
Joe (MCZ): About to send another shipment to IA with Botany. We're learning how to use the tabletop scribe. Several items digitized on it and already in BHL.
Martin (SIL): Completed BHL Africa workshop, very successful. This will serve as a roadmap for future workshops including NYBG’s IMLS grant. Connie Rinaldo and Martin also attended GBIF meeting in Madagascar. Connie represented BHL and Martin represented US. As a reminder, BHL is a GBIF member.
Diana Shih (AMNH): Sending shipment before end of month. Still doing Macaw and QA. Looking forward to staff mtg!
Marty Schlabach (Cornell): Wrapping up Purposeful Gaming. Using Macaw for Seed & Nursery catalogs. Couple of hiccups with Macaw upgrades but straightened out quickly. Getting first IA shipment ready.
David (Kew): Hoping to send shipment soon to NHM London. Also looking into things that would involve starting use of Macaw. Head of Library is leaving very soon. We're being restructured so some uncertainty on what that will look like.
Matt (MBLWHOI): Don’t have any big news to report. Continue to do social media work; not much in the way of digitization. We're planning to take advantage of Macaw training if given next month.
Randy (MBG): Status quo = a book every 1-2 weeks. Getting ready to scan USDA Plant Inventory series. Most to be barcoded first.
Keri and Jackie (SIL): Working on permissions mostly for scanning. “Status quo” really depends on size of materials. Average is 150 titles a month. Permissions, rare, and user requests. Selection based on how good rare book record is. Digitize 2-5 rare books a day (wow!), long queue for folios.
Richard Hulser (NHM-LAC): Quite busy. New president, a geologist, very supportive of digitization efforts. Optimistic that BHL activities will be well-received. Leaving for London for Internet Librarian and visiting NHM archives to look at entomology collection related to NHM-LAC’s. Hiring new archivist / record manager in next few months which may be helpful with further integration into BHL work. Going to miss November Staff Meeting. Fully intend to be in London in spring.
Susan and Don (NYBG): Sending shipments regularly, next one to probably go out next week. Averaging probably 40-60 per shipment, 1-2 shipments per month. Social media – put up tiny fossil book physical display to be up in conjunction with the BHL campaign. Also maintaining the two workstations for BHL games. For the new IMLS grant, we’ve posted openings for the metadata tech, FT for two years. Hoping to hire soon.
Joel (SIL): We've ordered the database servers. Moving ahead. Aiming to launch end of year or early January. Windows servers, – sometimes it’s now slow, response time will hopefully improve. At least 2 production servers + database server. Update:
Production servers are in house now. Yay! They hopefully will be up and running in the next couple of weeks.
Discovery Tools Working Group
Looking at BHL metadata and how to map to standard schemas and KBART
Submitted MODS review to DPLA, DPLA is currently reviewing
KBART mapping – we're hitting some sticky spots that will take some time.
Marty: Hope the records from serials solution will be much improved. Is there a timeline? No.
Roadblock with KBART which supplies serials solution data. Probably a larger project.
Tech Team Updates
Trish: Challenge in Science Gossip to complete 100,000 classifications. Halfway there in a couple of days. Looking to see what else we might want to put in queue, 19th century journals with illustrations, send to Trish
Purposeful Gaming – good buzz around award for Smorball
We’ll be doing a challenge in next couple of weeks
Mining Biodiversity – no cost extension.
Cathy Buckwalter (ANSP) in absentia: 1- We are still waiting for return of our last shipment before we can send another shipment out for scanning. 2- We have finished with our in-house scan of one of the Gemini requests and are in the process of preparing the image files and metadata, following the Macaw Workflow document instructions.
Staff Meeting
Please fill out attendee list linked into agenda. Very important so we can get an accurate headcount.
Dinner – Pre-night on the 11th. Very informal dinner
Also need to know how many. Only sending to people who are on that list.
12th Group dinner, organized but on your own
Staff Meeting Agenda
Who wants training in what?
Training Topics – BC and JC will send around a survey on some options.
Update: survey link
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/PZCNFSZ
Agenda for BHL Staff Meeting-- this is open to suggestion
The topics at the beginning, looking back and ahead -- these are things we need to think about throughout – not address individually. Questions we should be asking about as we talk about each goal. For example, when we talk about metadata I’d like to ask who is contributing to this, how is it serving your patrons, what grant funded projects are contributing to this?
Might also be worth bringing up separately for those who don’t think of what we do for BHL as part of the strategic plan. Some free form thinking also could be helpful
Martin – will provide draft agenda on October 29 to Members’ Council for their review. Changes / comments and then we will finalize during the first week of November.
Remind you all to stay tuned for training survey. Please send feedback via that anonymous poll
Gemini
Jackie – number of incoming issues are down a little bit, closing 20 issues. Thanks for your help. What kinds of stats are useful to hear?
Keri – pagination stats. It’s end of fiscal year and looking at pagination stats. Does anyone else look at Admin Dash to use the pagination stats? Are folks aware of different statuses for pagination? We’ll need a process for reviewing more regularly. Statistics – perhaps discussion at Staff Meeting?
Fossil Stories
Thanks to everyone who has been supporting the campaign. A lot of interest, featured in Hyperallergic article. Live webcasts, Field, SIL, and NHM-LAC.
More info via link in agenda.
Matt Person: Periscope from SI yesterday was great!
Disqus
Launching Oct 19, as part of Mining Biodiversity. On beta site, you can see what comments look like when added to a page in BHL. You can also follow comments being added. See above for link to learn more.
What are we going to do with the comments? Long term we’ll look into how we might use these.
One goal is to make it is easier to discover and discuss content in BHL.
Will people be using this to annotate? Where is the line between discussion and annotation?
Implemented in social media context with interest in discussion but there might be more avenues to pursue in future
