bhlstaffcallsep2015

Back to 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)
• Pan-BHL scanning funds now open for BHL Members scanning with Internet Archive (Carolyn)
• Round Robin - Digitization status update (all)
• Gemini (Jackie)
  • Gemini Status: There are now 1578 open issues in Gemini, down from an all time high of 1601 from our August call.
    • Thank you for all your work scanning, correcting, and answering: together, we closed exactly 100 issues since our last call.
    • Of course, more issues have been created: 76 issues have been created since our August call, 44 of which are still open.
    • For comparison, we received 111 issues for our July call, 77 issues for our June call, 189 for our May call.
  • Reference questions: Last call we asked everyone to check Gemini queues for issues with the "Reference" component.
    • There were 66 open issues at that time, of which 47 remain. Thank you to those of you who were able to look at these Reference questions.
    • More Reference questions have come in since then, of course, so the total number of open Reference questions is now at 51.
    • Reminder: If you have responded to the user, please remove this component from the issue so that we have an accurate count of outstanding reference queries. And of course, after any tasks have been taken care of, please close!
• FYI BHL Africa Workshop
  • new users in Gemini
• In-person November BHL Staff Meeting agenda planning (Bianca)

Notes

Attending
Bianca Crowley (SIL), Carolyn Sheffield (SIL), Randy Smith (MBG), Joe DeVeer (MCZ), Michael Neubert (LC), Matt Person (MBLWHOI), Diana Duncan (Field), Kelly Haberstroh (USGS), Cathy Buckwalder (ANSP), Leora Siegel (Chicago Botanic Garden), Martin Kalfatovic (SIL), Alison Harding (NHM), Tomoko Steen (LC), Daria Wingreen-Mason (SIL), Jackie Chapman (SIL), Suzanne Pilsk (SIL), JJ Ford (Harvard Botany), Keri Thompson (SIL), Mike Lichtenberg (MBG), Marty Schlabach (Cornell)

Minutes
Kelly Haberstroh, new Digitization Librarian at USGS in Reston VA

Pan-BHL Scanning Fund Now Open
Earlier this week the announcement went out the pan-BHL scanning funds are now open.
Balance: $21,343 (anticipated addition of 8800 in next couple months)
These funds come from BHL Member dues and so are available on a first come, first served basis to any Member institution scanning at an IA facility. As a reminder, our pan-BHL scanning workflow does require that you enter any items charged to the account into your tracking sheet BEFORE sending the shipment to IA. If anyone has questions about how to access or use your sheet, please feel free to contact Carolyn at sheffieldc@si.edu and she’ll be happy to get you set up.

Round Robin
Randy Smith (MBG) – plugging along with digitization

Joe DeVeer (MCZ) – digitization at same status as last month, shipment at IA facility since early June. Another shipment ready to go to them. Tabletop scribe now set up for MCZ and Botany. 4-5 books successfully uploaded to IA. Margins less than ½ inch difficult but exciting to see it up and running. Working on outstanding Gemini issues. Using Macaw requires pre-Macaw processing

Michael Neubert and Tomoko Steen (LC) – uploaded 1st book into IA for BHL as a test of Macaw.

Matt Person (MBLWHOI) – working on Gemini requests as have time. Continue to do social media posts. Since passing of Cathy Norton, a fellowship was established in her memory. This is a fellowship that will be awarded every year to early career researcher or librarian on a project which could be BHL related. see here for more information: http://www.mblwhoilibrary.org/about-library/library-fellowships

Diana Duncan (Field Museum) – Last shipment out there were some problems with them. One of the books was damaged. Will forward that email from the scanning facility to Bianca. Volunteer still working away on flickr for them.
Bianca: Damaged books and quality of image scanning not a new issue. If anyone has pointers or tips, please send Diana some notes if you could.

Kelly Haberstroh (USGS) – ours is an in-house digitization operation, fairly small. 1 Full time scanning tech. Working on some BHL requests. So far haven’t had experience with Macaw yet. Several from USGS will be meeting with BHL Secretariat in October, and Kelly will attend Staff Meeting in November

Cathy Buckwalter (ANSP) – Things are going pretty good. Waiting for shipment to be returned from SIL and then will send another out. Getting close to uploading an in-house scanned one up through Macaw. Hoping to attend Staff Meeting in November.

Leora Siegel (Chicago Botanic Gardens) – uploading monographs, and do believe we’ve figured out Macaw!

Martin Kalfatovic (SIL) – things are continuing with the move of BHL website to SIL. Hardware is being ordered. Seems to be going well.

Don Wheeler (NYBG) – some material at IA, corrections from QA. Another small shipment will go out. We’ll be sending out more now that funding is open again. Folks are coming back from vacation. NYBG took lead on an IMLS NLG over $800,000 for 2 years with goal of getting more BHL content into DPLA, partners include SIL, HMCZ, and MBG. We’re also dedicating a public work station for the BHL games.

Alison Harding (Natural History Museum) – There were some staffing issues at IA unit but new staff now who is "fantastic." Still mostly scanning from Gemini issues. There is a large digitization project underway for whole museum. To start digitizing official press publications soon! Now we have tabletop scanner.

Jackie Chapman (SIL) – scanning continues, mostly permissions titles.

JJ Ford (Harvard Botany) – Things going well. Preparing another shipment of about 60. Next shipment will be older things, pre-Linnaean so some interesting things coming up.

Marty Schlabach (Cornell) – still focused on digitizing seed and nursery catalogs from PG project. Re-organizing relationship with in-house scanning at another library at Cornell.

Mike Lichtenberg and Trish Rose-Sandler (MBG) – Science Gossip: Five new journals ready to be loaded, but this newer content won’t be visible until previous content is classified. We’ll be doing a challenge sprint. For Purposeful Gaming, we’ve been working to get more media coverage to increase players. We were mentioned in DLib magazine. Past week Smorball won an award for best serious game!

Discovery Tools Working Group
We meet twice a month to discuss how to get BHL data into other library data systems such as DPLA. We’ve been talking about our MODS schema and that should be wrapped up now. Hope to give DPLA a new set to pull from. Another task we’ve been working on is mapping to KBART schema, which is what various discovery tools are using. We’ve reached a sticking point that we’re currently working on now.

Gemini
Open issues down from 1601 to 1578.
Thanks to everyone who closed an issue! 100 were closed, 76 new came in.

BHL Africa
As an update some of you may know BHL A partner received a JRS grant to increase capacity. Part of that is to organize a workshop across various participants, figuring out what kind of content is to be provided, etc. First part of that will be a train-the-trainer workshop. BHL funded to provide materials for that. Thanks to Bianca, Carolyn, Grace, and Jackie for pulling together the materials for that. We’ll be delivering a 2.5 day workshop to be held in Nairobi as part of the TDWG meetings and JRS African capacity pre-TDWG trainings.The workshop will provide grounding in how to provide content.

One of the really good timings about this process is that its replicable and the materials will work well with future workshops. For example, for BHL Mexico. And also very timely for the IMLS grant that NYBG just received which will involve generating new content to BHL from partners around the country.

We could do a report on these workshops at the Staff Meeting

The BHL Africa Workshop will include Anne-Lise Fourie as the leader/coordinator and PI on the JRS funding, Martin Kalfatovic, Carolyn Sheffield, Grace Costantino, and Jackie Chapman.

As part of this, you'll see some new user names in systems, mostly in Gemini tracking system
Set up in preparation for the workshop and now designated as BHL Africa
We’ll just have to tweak it and see who will actually be the Gemini participants
For now we want to onboard as soon as possible

Staff Meeting - November
Logistical question – what are start and end times?
Start 830am on Thursday
End 4pm on Friday

Agenda building
What are your goals for the meeting?

Technical Priorities – discussion or presentation of BHL’s current technical priorities.
Would welcome opportunity to do that.

MRK will need to present the agenda to the BHL Members before the Staff Meeting. One question that has come up with Members in past is who has the authority to set priorities.

Lots of restaurants things to do in the area
Need some acclimation via social time. Suzanne might be able to help us out in this department! That would be awesome, Suz!

Add the PG Games to Agenda

How folks are integrating reference, behind the scenes things people are doing? Not how answering Gemini. How using BHL for your patrons and as a product

Seed section on patron services
Can certainly expand on that, too

Project Updates
NYBG’s IMLS grant, and Field Book Project carrying on. Should there be a section on these kinds of things?

Presentation on relationships between global units, help staff understand what those relationships are and what they mean

What do you want to go home with?
More information? Tasks that you can complete when you get back?

Publicity materials, we could bring samples and would love to see what others have done.

There is an anonymous poll within the Staff Meeting Agenda. We welcome your suggestions! Speak to Suzanne’s questions or other ideas you may have. Please provide your input.

Opportunity to stream meeting at all? Bianca to look into this