bhlstaffcalloct2016
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Passcode 961479
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
- Reminder: Toggle Mute/Unmute using *6
- New to the call? Please introduce yourself and welcome! (Bianca Crowley)
- Round Robin Updates - anyone have any news to report? (All)
- Hey, Can we shake up the agenda occassionally? Pulling up some of the last items to the top?
- Committee reports:
- EC & Members group (EC or Member volunteer to report?)
- Technical Team (Joel Richard)
- Collections Committee (Bianca Crowley)
- Cataloging (Diana D.)
- User feedback management aka "Gemini" (Bianca)
- Email alerts status
- Great collaboration work folks! BHL received 7.4% more service requests in FY 2016 than for the previous year, for a total of 1,467 requests. BHL staff resolved 1,209 requests this FY, up 6.1% over the previous year. This is good news demonstrating that BHL staff across the consortium are working harder to resolve issues, despite the loss of staff time dedicated to triaging requests, from 50% FTE to 10% FTE.
- Reference stats down (understandably) Impact of triaging resources lost is more apparent in terms of the reference requests handled, which were down by 47% for this FY compared to last, at 405 total (compared to 763 handled last FY).
- Grant projects:
- Expanding Access - IMLS (Patrick Randall/Mariah Lewis)
- NDSR grant (Connie Rinaldo/Joe deVeer)
- New "Rights Holder" field required, see http://bit.do/BHLmetadata
- Fedex digitization workflow to be discontinued
- partners should finalize last shipments
- contact Bianca crowleyb@si.edu for questions/copy of old documentation if needed
- Page Frights, October 1-31, 2016 (Grace)
- New BHL Interns (Grace)
- FYI Documentation updates (Bianca)
- Questions? / Open discussion...
Notes
New to the call? Polly Lasker – first time I’ve joined in the call. At Smithsonian Libraries at NMNH.
No Round Robin updates this time.
Committee Reports
EC & Members group
No one from the EC group on the call to give a report; Martin is at the GBIF meeting at the moment. Members had a meeting at the end of last month and their notes are on the wiki – go to meetings and calls link on the private wiki to locate the notes. FYI Michael Cook to sit in on Member calls for the future.
Technical Team (Joel Richard)
Portal Move
Joel: Admin portal was turned off last week. Looking at the final checks on the website at the Smithsonian. Joel did performance testing yesterday and he’s very pleased with site performance. We switch over on Tuesday morning (Oct. 25) of next week. It will take up to 2 hours when we slip the switch, and once the switch has happened the admin portal will be available again.
Next ingest from IA will happen this weekend, and content will be up to date as normal on Tuesday.
Users will not notice any downtime with the switch.
You can see the new site at
http://new.biodiversitylibrary.org
Once you’re able to access the admin site, you know that the switch is complete.
Data clean-up
Bianca has been looking at everyone’s item metadata in BHL, based on a report Mike sent her in August. She was looking at copyright metadata fields but also noticed that year fields have dirty data. Some tweaks on the back-end will help with data accuracy going forward and help Bianca’s review process in the future. Over the next government FY, Bianca will have a couple projects to update year field in BHL database (item level year field), solely on the back-end. This information is not presented in the public UI, but it’s a valuable field for data analysis.
After that analysis, Bianca will begin copyright metadata review. If you’re interested in having your copyright metadata reviewed as part of Bianca’s first pass, email Bianca. Bianca’s metadata review for copyright is exclusively for members and affiliates.
Suzanne: If there’s going to be data review for global edits, where should that be recorded so that other data elements besides copyright can be examined during the same time frame?
Bianca: Having a communal place where this data cleanup is kept would be useful. Maybe it can be submitted as a Google spreadsheets or we can find another place to keep track of analysis information.
Suzanne: Cataloging group might be good resource to think about global edits. We might want to have the group called together to discuss this when appropriate. I’d also like to do a global names review for names that could be globally changed. Even if we know that it won’t go forward clean, cleaning up what’s there will help searching and compatibility with harvesting BHL data. Maybe other groups should be looking at other fields that should be globally changed if that’s an option.
Bianca: I’m looking at
item metadata primarily. Some of the changes you suggested are title-level edits. The cataloging group would be a good place to discuss this. My process will be to figure out the best way to communicate these changes to Mike so that he can make these changes. Next time cataloging group meets, Bianca can sit in and they can figure out a good process.
[ ] Bianca and Suzanne will follow-up via email.
Collections Committee (Bianca Crowley)
Bianca is the Collections Committee lead. We had one meeting since the last staff call. At this meeting, the group took a look at the HathiTrust collections analysis survey conducted in 2015. Interesting survey – Hathi was surveying all of the partners that it works with to ask what they would like to see for the HathiTrust collection in the future and how they could expand their scope to add additional resources like still images or maps. It also illustrated how partners like to emphasize completeness of collection over expanding scope of collection. Copyright questions were discussed as well. The Hathi survey revealed that the partners were interested in moving towards processes where they could further curate the collection. Right now not a lot of options for partners to go in and edit collections in HathiTrust. It’s great that BHL has always recognized the need for this and has been working on it for some time. We’d like to approach HathiTust and see if our collections committees could collaborate to find ways to improve work that we’re already doing together. LINK: [INSERT]
Collections CMTE also working on taking a closer look at how to enter copy specific information for items in BHL. Field is available in BHL. You can select information from your catalog and provide it through BHL now. Stay tuned for more updates about that.
Cataloging (Diana Shih)
We haven’t met this month yet. We’re working on a document to propose a way to streamline authority control for names.
User feedback management
Email alerts status
Bianca: Gemini email alerts were problematic back in August. Jackie at SIL alerted Bianca to it. Bianca has been working to fix it, and she believes it’s fixed. If you suspect you’re not receiving email alerts, or have any other issues with email alerts, please let Bianca know.
Stats
- Great collaboration work, folks! BHL received 7.4% more service requests in FY 2016 than for the previous year, for a total of 1,467 requests. BHL staff resolved 1,209 requests this FY, up 6.1% over the previous year. This is good news demonstrating that BHL staff across the consortium are working harder to resolve issues, despite the loss of staff time dedicated to triaging requests, from 50% FTE to 10% FTE.
- Reference stats down (understandably) Impact of triaging resources lost is more apparent in terms of the reference requests handled, which were down by 47% for this FY compared to last, at 405 total (compared to 763 handled last FY).
- Reference means time we take to respond to users to let them know the status of their issue; to let users know that we received their ticket and will look into it. We’re working to prioritize responding to issues from users that need to be responded to.
Grant projects
Expanding Access - IMLS (Patrick Randall/Mariah Lewis)
The EABL team, along with others, are trying out a new version of Macaw.
Joel: This new version related to our effort to remove shockwave flash, which meant we had to update the uploader. Mariah is helping to work out kinks on this, which relates most specifically to uploading PDFs.
The EABL collection currently holds 2,274 volumes from 169 titles, containing 245,434 pages.
A “Getting Started with Macaw” video has been created. A walkthrough video of the Macaw process will be created after the new changes have been finalized. An introduction to BHL Metadata video is being worked on by Bianca and Mariah.
We currently have 86 in copyright titles from 45 contributors.
BHL articles have been defined in an initial group of used-with-permission titles and more articles will be defined soon.
NDSR grant (Connie Rinaldo/Joe deVeer)
Joe: Connie is at CETAF in Madrid. Things are moving along on the NDSR grant. We’re just now beginning to conduct interviews with applicants for resident positions. We received a total of 40 applicants. The posting has been closed now. Each of the partners have selected or are in the process of selecting candidates they’d like to interview. Each will be interviewing 3-5 candidates over the phone. Interviews will be conducted over the next week or two with the goal of concluding and being able to make offers by the end of November. Should be able to have all of the residents in place in early January as anticipated.
New "Rights Holder" field
**Now Required, see http://bit.do/BHLmetadata**
Bianca: We discussed the rights holder field last month. Bianca updated documentation to include this new field. It’s one of two new fields included in the BHL database. In metadata documentation, under items tab, you’ll find a definition for it. It’s the entity that provided permission for the content to be uploaded and included in BHL. If you’re assigned a permission title, put the copyright holder in the rights holder field in the partner meta app or macaw. See example
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/209962. All permissions titles must have this rights holder information added. Bianca is here to help you through the process.
Rights holder field is passed through partner meta app or macaw. Bianca provided example to issue in Gemini:
http://biodiversitylibrary.countersoft.net/workspace/0/item/30158.
Bianca provides rights holder information on the left in the rights holder field in Gemini and via the highlighted text in the issue description. Field on the left could be used to filter and search. This information needs to be added for each volume to the partner meta app. Generally speaking, Bianca will be enter the rights holder information into these tickets.
- Right now anyone could edit item description, which includes highlighted rights holder information. Right now only Bianca can edit the actual rights holder field on the left-hand side of the ticket.
- Think about your preference for where the rights holder information in Gemini should be displayed and let Bianca know which method you’d like her to use to indicate rights holder for permission titles.
- You MUST enter this rights holder field information for all permission titles going forward. See the BHL metadata requirements, macaw user guide, and partner meta app template for more information on how to enter this information.
- For old issues created before this requirement, Bianca will need to go back and make updates where possible. We’ll do our best to add rights holder information over time.
Susan Lynch: I think it’s important that anyone else filling in for Bianca, or EABL team, be able to do editing on the rights holder Gemini information. For that reason I like putting this information in the issue description and highlighting it in yellow.
No more Fedex workflow
Bianca: Fedex digitization workflow to be discontinued, can still use Fedex for shipping needs however
Only ANSP is currently using the BHL Fedex workflow.
Ria at ANSP: We have a few items at SIL right now that we’re working on getting shipped back to us, but we’re no longer sending shipments. We’re doing everything in house now.
Old documentation on Fedex workflow shipping has now been removed from the documentation center. Email Bianca if you need to see it for some reason. Fedex only used for shipments now.
Page Frights
Grace produced latest outreach campaign running from October 1-31, 2016
It's going really well!
Stats so far:
- 87 participating institutions to date.
- Nearly 3 million accounts reached on Twitter alone.
- Over 640,000 impressions on Instagram.
Grace to do in-depth analysis once campaign is over
Decorate your pumpkins with BHL's Pumpkin Patterns!
New BHL Interns
Grace: Shop dragons in BHL's Page Frights CafePress thanks to Carolina! Learn more about Carolina on our blog.
BHL Educational Internship: Constanza Hasselmann
Documentation
Bianca recently updated, including IA editing documentation. Bianca has been working on better ways for people to search and find documentation related to BHL.
Questions/Comments
Suzanne: does anyone know anybody at your institution that’s going to TDWG? One of my colleagues is going for the first time, and I wanted her to meet someone who’s going.
CONTEST! Dragon hoodie for whoever completes the most Gemini issues by the end of this year.
Bianca: I’ve been looking into Wordpress for a possible replacement to our public wiki. No commitments, still a lot to look into, but lots of possibilities with the site for our public wiki content.
