bhlstaffcallsep2017
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Passcode 961479
Lead: Mai Reitmeyer
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! (Mai)
- Outreach update (Grace)
Round Robin Updates / Open Discussion (All)
- News to report? Questions/Comments?
Grant Projects:
- Expanding Access -- IMLS (Patrick Randall/Mariah Lewis)
- NDSR grant -- (Joe deVeer/Connie Rinaldo)
- Field notebooks CLIR/Arcadia -- (Adriana Marroquin)
Committee reports:
Any other Questions / Comments?
REMINDER: Next call is scheduled for Thursday October 19 @ 11am ET
Notes
Outreach update (Grace)
Round Robin Updates / Open Discussion (All)
Jackie Chapman (SIL): Was asked to bring the group’s attention to an upcoming webinar on HathiTrust’s Shared Print Program (
https://www.hathitrust.org/shared_print_program), occurring Tuesday Oct. 3, 12pm ET.
The Members group has been discussing retention policies for print materials that are digitized for BHL. Smithsonian Libraries has committed to saving physical versions of all content they digitize for the life of the digital surrogate.
Hathi is also looking at formalize their policy in this area. They are aiming to get commitments from all Hathi Member Libraries to keep all
monographs that are digitized as part of Hathi for a period of
25 years. Jackie emailed the staff listserv with the program and webinar details.
Mai Reitmeyer (AMNH): AMNH recently upgraded Serial Solutions to manage serials holdings. The newer version allows for journals and ebooks to be linked in, and BHL is listed as one of the providers you can activate. However, Serial Solutions is linking to BHL items in IA, rather than linking to BHL itself. AMNH brought this to their attention, requesting the link go to BHL rather than IA. No one else on the call indicated that they knew of this or were using Serial Solutions, so Mai will report back to the group once she hears more.
Grant Projects:
- Expanding Access -- IMLS (Patrick Randall/Mariah Lewis)
Mariah Lewis (NYBG/EABL): To date, EABL has secured permission for over 200 in-copyright titles. There are currently 6,061 volumes from 728 titles (representing 657,690 pages) in the EABL collection on BHL:
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/browse/collection/eabl
Mariah attended the Association of Zoos and Aquariums Annual Conference and presented a poster, which was very well-received. See the blog post about it:
http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2017/09/association-of-zoos-and-aquariums.html
- NDSR grant -- (Joe deVeer/Connie Rinaldo)
Joe deVeer (MCZ) Reporting:
The residents are down to the final 3 months of work. They will be finishing up in December. The group had a tech team meeting in St. Louis at MBG the week of Sept. 11. All residents gave presentations of their work, research, findings, and recommendations to date. From this, during the meeting the team distilled 10 top recommendations for implementation in the next generation platform of BHL. These include:
- Ongoing usability studies
- Improving search and browse functionality
- Incorporation of IIIF viewer (BHL currently uses a book-based viewer, but we may want to include different types of objects (like art or archives). IIIF viewers will allow broader range of objects)
- Incorporate transcriptions and OCR corrections
- Improve data exports and documentation
- Incorporate annotations
- Filtering of scientific names
- Improved extraction and disambiguation of other names (author, geographic, common, etc.)
- Enable contributions to Wikidata
- Digital preservation solutions for files and metadata in BHL
At the meeting, the Tech Team up 8 work packages related to BHL 2.0. Some of this work will take place in the first quarter of FY18 and will apply to the existing platform (i.e. full text search and uploading existing transcription files to BHL to replace OCR content files). Full implementation of a transcription solution will be realized for BHL 2.0.
User surveys being conducted by Pam McClanahan at Smithsonian Libraries informed much of the meeting and decisions.
Pam McClanahan: We received over 600 responses to the user survey that was promoted via the BHL website and outreach. I am in the process of analyzing the data. We went over preliminary results at the recent NDSR/Tech meeting.
There are currently 2 additional surveys in progress: One for consortium participants (aka BHL staffers). The survey is open until September 22:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/VV7C537
They other survey in progress is directed as users working with BHL at the system level. It was sent to GBIF, EOL, and API key holders.
Pam will be analyzing those results as well.
- Field notebooks CLIR/Arcadia -- (Adriana Marroquin)
Arcadia Smithsonian Field Book Project (FBP): 1,168 items digitized (45% of goal). 948 items published in BHL (36% of goal). FBP recently brought on members of the Smithsonian Libraries digitization team to help through the rest of grant period.
CLIR Field Notes Project (FNP): Just over 112,000 pages digitized (23% of goal). As of this morning, 1,040 items are available through IA, consisting of 92,319 pages (19% of goal). 952 items are currently in the BHL collection, consisting of just over 72,000 pages.
The FNP does a monthly blog series on the BHL blog, publishing the first Thursday of every month. The series highlights FNP partners and content being digitized as part of the grant. The latest post was from the Field Museum:
http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2017/09/a-botanists-botanist-field-books-of.html
Take a look at the series:
http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/search/label/%23BHLFNP
A 2017 proposal to CLIR to expand the Field Notes Project was officially submitted yesterday (Sept. 20). We will hear back in December whether we received the grant.
Committee reports:
- Technical Team (Joel Richard)
Tech team met in St. Louis the week of Sept. 11, after the NDSR residents met. The team discussed the NDSR work. They also planned out the next round of big development for BHL and laid out features they want to add before they really dive into the BHL 2.0 process.
A Work Package Document is available from the meeting wiki page:
TechMeeting_Sept2017
The team also discussed what might fall under the work that BHL Egypt will do, as well as Mike Lichtenberg’s contract going forward.
Nothing new to report on Macaw.
At the meeting, the team also looked at an alpha version of the full text search interface. There is still more work to do; it’s not in production.
On the last Committee call, Trish and Susan Lynch reported on the tech meeting and highlighted the outcomes most relevant to the work of the Collections Committee.
Among the highlights were:
- BHL v2 will need data model to accommodate non-book objects (visual resources, archival materials, and future content types yet unnamed)
- Visualization of content will be useful both internally for identifying gaps but also externally on the BHL site as way for users to explore our content by geography, time periods, taxonomic Kingdoms, etc
- In order to make visualization functional there will need to be some data cleanup and normalization of bibliographic metadata (e.g. publication date info is not stored in both date and volume fields)
- Current version of BHL will continue for about 6 months and Mike will finish current commitments (full text search, bulk uploading of articles, making existing transcriptions available/viewable in BHL e.g. William Brewster papers)
- Katie Mika is doing a proof of concept to put BHL data into Wikidata. This is a way to share BHL data more widely and normalize data like author names.
There was some talk of reviving the old de-duper tool, but this was ultimately put on the backburner.
As part of BHL 2.0, we’re talking about incorporating additional, related information about items in BHL. Diane Rielinger has been working on a document on this discussion:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M_3a8Sz6ryurRz-byptU2cgHYT3yPKrXvBDAtalu2XM/edit#heading=h.p3lmqskdrteg
Diane is looking for comments and feedback, and then next steps will be writing requirements for submission to BHL 2.0.
- Cataloging (Diana Duncan)
The group met on Tuesday. NDSR resident Katie Mika talked about her project, which is helpful for the group, who’s been tasked with submitting ideas for authority control for BHL 2.0.
Diana also spent time cleaning up the Cataloging workspace. They are down to 15 items still needing work.
Joe is currently triaging Gemini while Bianca is out. So far it’s been a very light week, with only a few items that Joe resolved himself.
REMINDER: Next call is scheduled for Thursday October 19 @ 11am ET
