bhlstaffnotesJul212011

Back to staffconferencecallagendas | July Agenda

July, 21 2011

Attendees: Becky, William, Jane, Gilbert, Bianca, Trish, Joe DeVeer, Chris C., JJ, Grace, Matt P., Diana D., Alison, Diana Shih, Michelle A.,

I. Introductions: Jacqueline (JJ) Ford – JJ has replaced Katie Mullen to help address MCZ BHL issues and has been instrumental with Gemini issues; also helping to add BHL URLs to Hollis catalog. Welcome JJ!

II. Round Robin (all)

• MCZ : URL holdings record in Aleph, shipment at IA almost done; 1 shipment ready to go and lots in the queue. There is a lot of stuff at the in-house scanning facility and Joe is potentially interested in uploading our in-house scans using SIL’s new workflow. Joe, Chris and JJ will be going to Life and Lit. Maybe Connie’s going too?

• NYBG: no update, not on call; same issue as AMNH re: IA scanning facility; welcome to ship books using the BHL FedEx account to SIL.

• MBLWHOI: Matt, has a shipment at the scanning center. They will continue scanning at a very slow pace.

• AMNH: In the midst of preparing a shipment; can no longer send items to IA scanning facility as it has moved from Jersey City to Princeton, NJ which is prohibitively expensive for shipping costs; sending boxes to Bianca and Grace ~ 20 volumes at a time. Diana does not know yet if scanning money will continue past July but, is assuming it will be extended because Tom has given Diana the ok.

• SIL: Grace, business as usual. 100 vols. per week – combination of BHL and History Art and Culture (HAC). A majority of the scans are BHL. Rare books and folios going out and there are 3 scanning workflows going at the moment. Gilbert is pulling more things and filling the gaps.

• Harvard Botany: has no money for scans so the Gemini requests are being reassigned by Grace. Joe will investigate the possibility of MCZ taking on Judy’s scans.

• Field: Diana, sending a few items to SIL. Got a small grant to digitize materials on Africa and may send some things to Ft. Wayne. (3hr drive from them) UIUC is still continuing to scans perhaps, Field could work with them? May send the books through ILL to UIUC to save on shipping. Diana performing LIS upgrade and might need to have this completed before scanning can begin in earnest (best of luck!).

• (Bianca to check in w/ Tom re: BHL FedEx acct now that AMNH, Field, and others such as NYBG and Harvard Botany may need to use it)

• CalAcad: Their first shipment is scanning at IA; after this they have another shipment of about 200 items. They got an extension until to December to send scanning items. Foldouts are more expensive. Some issues with MARC records getting associated properly with the scans. IA supposed to take care of issue; Becky to bug Ginger about it (again). Haven’t sent any new shipments yet until MARC issue 100% resolved.

• NHM: Jane and Allison, they have internal funding for most of the rest of the year. They are trying to strategically budget and identify scanning priorities to make the money last. Averaging about 30,000 pages a month. They are meeting August 17th with David Iggulden – Kew Royal Botanic Gardens. Perhaps, Kew can take on some of the botanical titles that Harvard Botany cannot do (also from NHM’s todo list too). Wonderfetch is working well (YIPPIE! Way to go NHM).

• MOBOT: Michelle, still scanning Gemini requests. Grace has redirected many of Harvard Botany’s requests to MOBOT. Scanning orchid folios.

III Other business

• Face to face meeting around Life and Literature, November 14-15? Anyone wanna try for that? Who can go? SIL, a few will be attending. Field will be attending for obvious reasons. Becky could still make it but, it conflicts with MCN conference. China BHL will be going to SIL, Life and Lit then Missouri. Matt P. may be going but there is no funding. Alison, it’s possible but, no funding. Trish, some people will be going but again, funding an issue. People do want a staff meeting but, we need a potential agenda for it. Bianca, BHL future: how can we help to keep things going? Other topics to make stronger cases for getting funding. Hotels? Essex Inn & Best Western is near by. Audrey Aronowsky (EOL) is having trouble getting hotels for the conference because there is another huge conference in the vicinity going on at the same time. If staff meeting can occur, Bianca needs to work with Field to secure a room (already in touch with Christine G.) but nothing can really be planned until it is certain who can make it. Chicken?! Egg?!
  • Agenda page for BHL staff f2f ideas:

• FYI SIL has posted their documentation on how they automatically upload their in-house scans to IA http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/Upload - would anyone else like to set something similar up? MCZ, perhaps? CalAcad? Folks interested should follow up with Bianca

• FYI Grace going to conference re: blog success, BHL and our users http://biodiversitylibrary.blogspot.com/search/label/bhl%20users (Grace): Grace will be presenting about users/blogging applications in October, New Orleans at an ASSI&T conference; would be interesting to get an aggregation of questions folks answer as part of the BHL and our users blog posts since it acts like a mini in-depth survey of our users; Grace may present on the findings.

• flickr update (Bianca) http://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary/ :Gilbert is embedding metadata in the images before the image goes to Flickr. If you download the image the metadata is embedded in the image. Grace and Bianca tweet one image a day and are adding it to Flickr. Always looking for cool images. If you have any send Gilbert and Bianca. Michelle, Matt P. are flickr users. Blog post about Flickr will be coming out as well. Feeding flickr images into EOL.

• BHLE/global update (William): Copies of 26 TB out of 53 TB data (from thumper server), have been sent to London and Egypt. Disks are processing in Egypt then they will go to China after finished. They will then set up a script that copies the rest of the data. Australia, just launched, is accessing the data from IA. BHL Europe is getting ready to launch in November. Australia has redone the user-interface (very nice, have a look http://bhl.ala.org.au) Send topics to William that Global BHL should be talking about at their upcoming meeting. There are a few potential BHL partners that will be at Life and Lit from Africa.

• CiteBank update - (Trish):8,000 records have been brought in manually through the importer. Bringing stuff in from OAI.

• BHL records in MODS exports available, see http://biodivlib.wikispaces.com/data%20exports: All BHL records are now available for export in MODS format. Records available at both title and item levels. Does anyone have an interest in getting a MODS export for only their institutions records? Only Diana D. replied by saying she’d rather have all instead. Trish and Bianca will tweak the Data Exports page with more user friendly language as time allows. We probably need a blog post about this at some point soon...ish...

Bianca will send out a final email addressing the remaining agenda items:

• Q2 staff report (Bianca)
• Worldcat update (Suzanne/Bianca) - OCLC have improved BHL records in WorldCat, should now see BHL records in WorldCat for both monographs and serials; HOWEVER, OCLC only received a static copy of BHL records from a while ago; they need a new batch of records and it is the idea that we can direct them to our MODS exports to get the records that way.
• Pagination update (Gilbert) - Gilbert has been working away paginating content in the BHL that needs help for all institutions; of note is his effort to paginate the columnar pages of Botanische Zeitung. Wow! Check out this fabulously paginated volume 1: http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/104878#page/5/mode/1up
• BHL tech update (Trish) - TBD
• NEH grant submitted - Art of Life (Trish) - TBD
• FYI Darwin's Library - it's been up and running for a while but news since our last staff call 2 months ago! http://biodiversitylibrary.org/collection/darwinlibrary