bhlstaffcallsep2014
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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 - New to the BHL staff calls? Please introduce yourself (Bianca)
- FYI New Serial Deduplication plan info available
- Round Robbin (All, 30 min)
- Outreach News (Grace, 15 min)
- Metadata Sharing is Caring (Suzanne, 5 minutes)
- Tech Review
- Art of LIfe (Trish)
- Purposeful Gaming (Trish)
- Mining Biodiversity (William)
As you may know, Mining Biodiversity (http://www.miningbiodiversity.org) is one of the awarded projects on the third round of the transatlantic Digging Into Data Challenge, a competition aiming to promote the development of innovative computational techniques that can be applied to big data in the humanities and social sciences. As objectives of this project, we are aiming to transform the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) into a next-generation digital resource that will provide access to the full content of BHL documents via semantically enhanced, interactive browsing and searching capabilities, allowing users to more conveniently locate information of interest to them.
In order to better understand the information requirements of BHL users, we invited more than 55 participants in a survey which will help us determine the functions and enhancements that will best cater to the real needs of users. We have concluded our survey to more than 55 contacted about requirements and we are finishing our summary and conclusions, which we want to run through our focus group. So far 11 persons have agreed to participate as part of our focus group and we may get a couple more.
Also, we've been collecting relevant vocabularies, ontologies and authorative lists to help during the annotation of a gold standard in our BHL corpus, tagging concepts (persons, species, locations, habitats, traits and temporal expressions) and events (associations between of the above concepts).
Therefore, we'll need 3-4 volunteers to help out with the concept tagging in October and a crowd using CrowdFlower for training the automatic event tagging in November and December. - BHL Downtime Report
As you may have seen, our BHL Portal and services were down between Monday, September 1st, 2014 6:00pm. and Tuesday , September 2nd, 2014 11:18 pm. because of a failure in the firewall controller. This left the BHL metadata information inaccessible to the external network. The situation was finally resolved by reinstalling the Firewall. Maintenance was then programmed for Thursday, to set up a new motherboard for the firewall. To minimize problems like these, a spare firewall server is now available to avoid further delays.
Notes
Attending
Bianca Crowley (SIL), Carolyn Sheffield (SIL), Chris Cole (NAL), Matt Person (MBLWHOI), Grace Costantino (SIL), Randy Smith (MBG), Diana Duncan (Field), Joe DeVeer (MCZ), Martin Kalfatovic (SIL), Heather Yager (CAS), Diana Shih (AMNH), Marty Schlabach (Cornell), Jackie Chapman (SIL), Suzanne Pilsk (SIL), JJ Ford (Harvard Botany), Mike Lichtenberg (MBG), Daria Wingreen-Mason (SIL), Tomoko Steen (LC), Alison Harding (NHM), William Ulate (MBG), Trish Rose-Sandler (MBG), Cathy Buckwalter (ANSP)
Welcome & Introductions
Chris Cole
National Agricultural Library, Beltsville
Affiliate of BHL
Heather Yager
California Academy Sciences
Archivist and Interim Head Librarian
Serial Deduplication Plan
New workflow involves issue-tracking system. See
Deduping Tools for more information and stay tuned for updates as we begin adopting this workflow.
Marty – where does this reside?
Left navigation bar in wiki, under Digitization Topics, you’ll see link to Deduplication Tools.
Round Robin
Randy Smith (MBG) – Working with creating e-book from materials on Ecuadorian plants. Grace offered to do some promotion around the eBook. Working on segment creation for LA County Arboretum publications (interns working directly with LA Co Arboretum)
Matt Person (MBLWHOI)– We had sent out small shipment (1st in a long time) and that came back. Continuing to tweet MBL’s BHL content on Fridays.
Diana Duncan (Field) – Nothing new at Field. Participated in Flickr call. Still doing Flickr and Art of Life.
Joe (MCZ) – shipment ready to come back to us, preparing 2 new shipments
Alison (NHM) – nothing new to report, scanning as usual
Diana Shih (AMNH) – nothing much but got Macaw up and running! Uploaded 1 journal issue and 1 book and trying to get volunteers to help. Susan Lynch left here and will be John Mignault’s replacement. Bianca: No pan-BHL scanning money yet. Working on Art of Life.
Marty (Cornell) – very little time for BHL with classes resuming. Working on IMLS Purposeful Gaming project which has been collaborating already with NAL. Welcome NAL! Working on deduplicaton of seed & nursery catalogs among NYBG, Cornell, and NAL - complex b/c institutions all catalog these materials a bit differently
Jackie (SIL) – Reaching end of fiscal year, not sending out scanning, just scanning in-house.
JJ (Harvard Botany) -- I’ve been preparing Asa Gray correspondence to go out next month, with funding from Arcadia. Shipment is finished at IA and back. Getting Flickr, pagination, & QA intern back.
Tomoko (LC) – Waiting to have Associate Librarian in place, still selecting books for scanning when possible, no longer sending to FedScan
Cathy (ANSP) – Waiting for shipment to come back so can send more books out. Elizabeth who worked on BHL things moved on to another position. Will be a delay for rehiring. Working with Art of Life volunteers
Chris Cole (NAL) – Not directly related to this but focused on public access demand, rolling out PubAg repository. A lot will be peer reviewed articles, many authored by USGS staff, will be set up for grant recipients required to deposit articles within 12 months of publication
We have an IA installation in our building
Continuing that process and contracting for metadata creation
involved in seed catalog initiative
Heather Yager (CAS)
Conducting head librarian search
Institution examining research goals
Working with iNaturalist team to push app to completion = BioCaching 1) conservation 2) linking in historical component
Pulls records from GBIF
See Google map with GBIF occurrence records
Scavenger hunt in their area
People can go to areas where collected in past and see if can identify occurrence today
We also link them to published literature and field notes
Grace will help with publicizing
Scanning volunteer, enhancement
New volunteer will be digitizing field notes
Outreach News Grace
Each institution to propose a candidate book for a blog post
- Social Media Campaigns – week long themed, Monsters Are Real
Monsters based on real creatures
In relation to this, I’ll be contacting social media contact at your institution
Working on best way to aggregate into one page so easy to find
- AdThis – on last couple of calls, William has mentioned Digging Into Data. We are adding an application into BHL, agenda links to page about it. App for better discovering and sharing content
Give social media sharing and following buttons. We had those but we’re going to use the new ones instead. Improved options, + allows you to share on any platform
Increases reach
Recommendation feature within website
Comes with a great analytics system
What platform sharing on, what content is being shared
We'll be using free version
Can see examples of recommendations on blog already
No negative feedback
Seen 5% increase in pages viewed and 17% increase in time spent on site
Added AdThis to beta site
Adjusted code to always share permanent link
Silent launch and then in a month, we’ll assess
Tomoko – I’ll pass it along to the person who does our blog
Metadata Sharing is Caring Suzanne
Working with OCLC about products they offer and where BHL fits as a publisher data
Suz will send out a Doodle call for participating on call with OCLC
BHL records we have in OCLC so far – we’ve done a couple of different ways, they’ve harvested through OAI as truncated, not sure if they still are, gotten full records through IA, folks are cataloging BHL things as electronic versions.
Once we have more info, we’ll better understand how to send data, if we want to use KBart, if we want to be part of WorldCat then we might need to look at how data they’re fetching from us
Should I send Doodle poll to Staff writ large or just people who are interested?
Bianca: Send to group of interested folks with a cc to BHL-STAFF
Tech Updates
Trish Rose-Sandler (MBG)
Art of Life – 10 million of 35 million pages have been processed. Identified 610,000 pages having images. Pages are being classified, 28000 so far. About to get another import from Macaw and may double very soon. Many thanks to volunteers with classification process!
Spoke with Kalev Leetaru who recently extracted millions of images from IA corpus and uploaded to Flickr
Our images are being uploaded as part of that
For Art of Life, this is great
His approach is slightly different than ours, his is at image level and ours is at page level. His is focused on quantity whereas ours has been on quality
Nothing in his set indicates that those are from BHL. Once we have that, we can point users to it.
Purposeful Gaming
Continuing to scan seed catalogs and transcribingWilliam Brewsters. Designing two games
William Ulate (MBG)
Mining Biodiversity project
Partnering with Several other institutions
Engagement and discussion of objects, as Grace mentioned
Also, semantic enhancement
We asked what are requirements for semantic searching and browsing and received 20+ responses and created a focus group of about 11 people
Collecting vocabularies and authority lists
To help with tagging concepts, traits, habitats, and events, among others
Group of three or four volunteers
Will be learning from gold standard and adding corrections, hopefully end of October
Provide crowd environment where people can evaluate accuracy of tagging
Will be done during November and December of this year
Down time report – Portal was down Sept 1 -2, failure in firewall at MBG. Situation was resolved by re-installing
New motherboard set up and spare firewall server to prevent similar in future
