CWG meeting Vienna 2010

Minutes of the workshop

BHL-Europe Communication Working Group
Vienna, 25 May 2010

Jiri Kvacek:

Agenda
BHL coordination of dissemination activities
EUROPEANA PR
Licensing
BHL in Wikipedia
Social networking

Problems in coordination of dissemination activities
partners not using standardized promotion kit
difficult to get texts from partners for newsletters
how to engage partners further to participate in dissemination activities
one of the problems is that BHL-EUROPE is not a main task of the various partners – tasks are often ignored for lack of time/resources

library questionnaire resulted in a number or respondents, people have been participating more since last meeting
nature of the beast
BHL-US has similar problem – regular conference calls to try and address this problem; conference calls organized around specific subject matter: Executive call, Institutional Council call, Collections Committee call, one-off issues on an as needed basis
BHL-EUROPE has various Google groups, but not a lot of regular conference calls – 1 for project management, 1 for ingest-related issues
Henning scans BHL-US conference call notes – some notes may be misunderstood for BHL-EUROPE colleagues
Perhaps BHL-EUROPE could organize regular conference calls (maybe skype? - maybe the learning curve is an issue, but screen sharing and recording tools available; maybe NHM facilities)
what would the purpose be? Who should be included?
Conference calls helpful for motivating others, regular conversation helpful for keeping others “in the loop” – knowing that there is a regular call available to join in on is important; important for project updates, feedback, transferring interim report currently on a ¼ly basis to a conference call on a monthly basis
Email as the ubiquitous baseline for communication – but difficult to coordinate discussions via email, hence making more use of the wiki ==> conference calls also provide discussion potential
several levels: high level mngmt, technical mngmt, issue-based: ingest for ex.,
OpenLibrary has an internal bulletin to update partners, monthly
BHL-US calls used to marry technical aspects w/ library aspects but then topics split into separate lines of communication
Bianca Lipscomb's role has come to be a major communications link b/w library staff and technical staff
Connie Rinaldo's role is also to bridge the gaps b/w the administrative arenas and the library staff
BHL-EUROPE core group is working in this way, WP2 leader to fulfill this role (Melita)
Bianca to discuss further w/ Melita, Boris, & Henning
Melita to bridge communications among various groups – Tine to compile and disseminate
Matt: Doodle as good motivational tool
Should be required that ea. partner should have a BHL-EUROPE link on their website – how to mandate this?
Need for templates in the wiki – technical issues for Jiri to solve

Preparation of the prototype release
Europeana to release something in summer, but PR activities planned for fall 2010 – BHLE to piggyback? But BE CAREFUL to specify PROTOTYPE
Need to manage user expectations
Sept mtg in Woods Hole may change direction of BHL in general
Need to discuss prototype release w/ tech group
Jiri: BHLE should take advantage of Europeana new features release
GRIB planned for release in Oct and may be better “release” than the prototype
keeping news about the prototype subdued requires communication with the partners – depending if you want feedback
Europeana “soft release” from July on, to engage in roadshows in the fall
Jiri: important to keep the public abreast of BHLE developments
Henning: need to confirm with technical team to see what is comfortable for release
Lizzy: need for a targeted approach to get feedback on the features in development
We all know you can never please anyone when it comes to releasing prototypes vs. finished products

Edinburgh meeting
BHLE needs from Europeana
Europeana needs from BHLE
need for understanding more the general user (European citizen) – Europeana can help
How to attract the general user?
Lizzy: virtual exhibition; user surveys on general Europeana
Matt: public librarian perspective – very positive results showing BHL to general public; BHL still applicable even for non-science reference questions
Lizzy: need to put biodiversity info in context
Connie: EOL links to BHL is a huge referrer esp. for general public
Obviously BHL is not so user friendly for the gen. public b/c based on known-item searching – reliance on EOL to drive traffic from the gen. public to BHL
Lack of common name search an issue for gen. Public, but EOL is able to satisfy this problem – however Europeana does not connect common names to BHL texts
UBio has common name searching functionality but is not integrated into BHL at the moment; a prioritization issue – check into this further
Common names associated with scientific names via authority file functionality not necessarily as part of OCR
Need to set a date for incorporation of common name association w/ scientific names in the future b/c this is an essential way to bring the general public to BHLE via Europeana – Henning to follow up with technical team
Maybe another BHL node in Australia or China might be able to provide resources to address this problem
EOL resolves this problem...so for the time being direct people to EOL

Lizzy:
provides link to newsletter for BHLE
communications tools, w/ images from all the projects linked to Europeana http://version1.europeana.eu/web/guest/imagery/
putting materials into context helps to garner public interest; strategy to create a story/narrative about endangered and/or extinct species
http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/exhibition/roma_journey/eng/index.html
Need for someone in BHLE to curate this story, need for budget to support this task
EOL being incorporated into Harvard undergrads to create spp. pages then the pages are vetted by the professor
perhaps a workgroup among various BHLE partners to work on these virtual exhibitions
need for a tutorial for students/library staff – need for a workshop to guide them in learning what to search for/how to use BHL
every 4 yrs ? Conference – Jana has inserted a digital library symposium into conference; have Chris come to talk about BHL; other talks GRIB, AnimalBase; perhaps hold workshops during this meeting
Jiri: all of this can be done on the website, important to have a record of how people are working w/ various BHLE tools, tutorial tools (evaluate as part of user evaluation for next yr)

Bianca to send Jiri link to BHL book-of-the-week blog posts for coordination of efforts

Edinburgh inspiration
Web 2.0: Facebook, twitter – need for coordination w/ BHLE & BHL; to discuss further w/ Martin K.; who will make the messages for BHLE (who makes the msgs for BHL?!)
f2f: roadshow
Schools: educational tutorials how-to

Bianca to send out notes from SIL web2.0 mtg w/ Sarah Banks (claims 20% of her time)

Confusing for users BHL vs. BHLE – how do we construct unified msgs?
WHAT and WHO will do it?
Need to demonstrate to the commission that users access BHL via wikipedia and social media tools; multi-language link
BHL RSS feeds for blog posts and recent additions
Tine: need to be careful that BHLE is the first to make facebook pages to be official (Henning: same for wikipedia). Important to consider 1st pages in multiple languages

Jiri:
to set up wikipedia pages in the languages already available for BHLE set-up; also to set up Facebook and Twitter (Tine to help); good to have BHLE as a separate FB pages; Twitter - set up hash tags for BHLE to aggregate a BHLE content stream; create “twibe” to associate BHLE tweeters

Usually identified 1 POC/partner but this does not always work...

Licensing to be discussed on Friday

BHL Dissemination group: Connie Rinaldo (MCZ), Susan Fraser (NYBG), Martin Kalfatovic (SIL), Jean Farrington (CalAcademy) – administrative level
Communication+Plan
publicity material: posters, flyers, buttons, what to present at which conferences, need better organization for collecting info about conferences that people attend
--library conferences
--bioinformatics conferences
--scientific conferences
--need to coordinate participation for BHL vs. BHLE conferences – need for list of conferences we SHOULD attend
----BHLE has dbase for conferences
--BHL presentation page: BHL+Presentations
--Connie: presentations have been about BHL-global
--BHLE has templates for posters & presentations
change the logo?!
--how to align the 2 logos BHLE & BHL?
--need for “corporate design”
--BHLE has a designer that may be able to help with this service (Connie to follow up)
--Lizzy: project logo vs. corporate logo ok

Chris: could you make us a template for how you created the poster for your Madagascar mtg? Please...

Connie to serve as POC to Tine (conference dbase mngr) and Jiri for coordination of dissemination activities
--need for a document/dbase that can be communally updated...wiki not always the easiest tool, maybe google docs

Need to promote BHLE newsletter among BHL users – Connie and dissemination to help coordinate

Lizzy: good also to know peoples' travel schedules for various conferences – TripIt used by Connie, Martin K., Chris F. (but yet another tool that needs to be updated); Martin K. often good about organizing BHLers during national mtgs, for ex. ALA

Slideshare useful for sharing presentations but not always the easiest tool to work with....

side note (Matt): David Remsen reports that BHL does not use all of UBio services in search functionality
--need to look into WHY?

Need someone to help analyze Google Analytics
--Bianca to send out info about Seb Chan Powerhouse Museum talk