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Collections Committee Discussion

Back to Collection's CMTE Main Page | Current Discussions

Table of Contents

Dec 12, 2016
Oct 31, 2016
Oct 17, 2016
Aug 8, 2016
July 11, 2016
June 13, 2016
May 16, 2016
May 2, 2016
April 4, 2016
Mar 21, 2016
Mar 7, 2016
Feb 22, 2016
Feb 8, 2016
Jan 11, 2016
Dec 14
Nov 30
Nov 2
Oct 19
Oct 5
Sep 20
Aug 24
Aug 10
Jul 13
Jun 15
Jun 1
May 4
Apr 6
Mar 9
Feb 23
Feb 9
Jan 26
Jan 12, 2015
2014 Notes
Dec 15
Dec 1
Nov 3
Oct 20
Oct 6
Sep 22
Aug 25
Aug 11
July 25
June 30
June 16
May 19
Apr 21
Apr 7
Mar 24
Feb 24
Jan 27, 2014
2013 Notes
Dec 2
Nov 18
Resolving author duplication
Nov 4
Oct 21
Aug 26
July 15
July 1
June 3
Apr 22
Apr 8
Feb 4
2012 Notes
Dec 10
Nov 26
Sept 24
Sept 10
8/20
8/6
7/23
6/18
4/9
4/2
3/26
3/18
3/5
2/27
2011
2010
Past Years' Notes
Notes from conference calls in reverse order - most recent call notes are on top

Dec 12, 2016

Attendees: Bianca, Gil, Don, Connie, Diana, Michael, Kelli, Mai, Joe, Patrick, Susan Lynch, Matt P., Diane R.
Agenda

Notes
Linnaeus Link = Union catalog for Linnaean works - Soulsby Bibliography
LL is connecting this catalog to digitized works - has identified gaps in its catalog that BHL partners could fulfill
see LL spreadsheet with list under notes from Sept 19 below
NYBG has list of titles assigned, other folks can take on titles since they have a backlog
Susan can put in 20 titles into Gemini (as scan requests)
MCZ can help
BHL partners: Susan Fraser (NYBG), Leora Seigel (CBG), Kew, Field?, NHM, NAL?
List that they gave was cumbersome to work with - Soulsby numbers as identifiers
list is 8000+ entries!
LL Secretary has retired and they are currently seeking a replacement
Have asked BHL to wait on pilot project until new Secretary hired

HathiTrust
Bianca contacted HathiTrust general email to inquire re: Collections Committee collaboration - additional contact info needed
Trish knew someone on Collections Committee? Was it Carmelita Pickett?
DS sent Carmelita’s info, Bianca to follow up - DONE

Cornell hosting CRMS
Cornell got Dean to sign off on HathiTrust’s release for Engineering publications
also other subject areas digitized and working on releases for those
Ag and Life Sciences pubs - going to Dean and requesting permission
permission acquired will open up access to Cornell publications to the public
Michelle Pallilo? of HathiTrust provided download listing Cornell affiliated publishers and variations on publisher names
also includes material difficult to determine rights
Cornell trying to clean up huge list to take to Dean to sign off on
If someone has authority to sign off on a form, append title,
Hathi goes through the list and opens up the titles
UT Austin has done this for their pubs
Hawaii also
focus on titles where they can identify someone who has authority to sign off

CRMS work completed for HathiTrust overall
many titles in HathiTrust have gone through the CRMS process and have been found to be in the public domain and therefore made open access
Bianca asked for a list of these publications but there isn't one handy
however, HathiTrust provides all its data via https://www.hathitrust.org/hathifiles and following codes can be used to analyze data to produce a list ourselves:

Rights attributes:
pd
pdus
icus

Rights reason codes:
ncn
ren
cdpp
unp
crms
add
exp

SL thinks it’s a really good project and chance to get a lot of recent material
Michael Cook to check with Sarah K about status
Work that Cornell is doing will eventually find its way into
Patrick and Susan interested to know more
[x] Bianca to send details out to group
SIL would like to use the information from the CRMS Hathi list to help determine candidates from its own collection for digitization
Bianca will keep the group posted as SIL makes progress

Michael Cook not sure how much MSN scanned material for Cornell went where…
some scanned by Google into Hathi, some scanned by MSN

Oct 31, 2016

Happy Halloween! Quick call today:
Debriefing on Internet Archive Library Leaders Forum

Attendees: Diana Shih, Polly Lasker, Patrick & Joe, Don & Susan, Kelli, Diane, Trish, Bianca
[X] follow up with Joe about TT Scribe documentation via ZenDesk
[ ] send presentations from Library Leaders Forum out to BHL Collections CMTE

Oct 17, 2016

Agenda

Notes
Attendees: Sarah Kennedy, Kelli Trei, Bianca Crowley, Gil Taylor, Matt Person, Don Wheeler, Trish Rose-Sandler, Diana Shih, Susan Lynch, (Regrets: Michael Cook)

Kelli says great news, new hire digitization manager in place!
[X] Bianca to talk to Kelli Trei

Copy specific information
Examples:
  1. http://biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/14238 t.3:no.3-5
  2. http://biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/5755
  3. http://biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/5022
  4. http://biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/7333
  5. http://biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/8934
  6. http://biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/8669

best case scenario is to copy/paste but use guidelines if more than 3 lines!
if copy specific information about the print volume
what about copy specific pages out of order? yes good idea; missing pages for example - message in the meantime

Hathi Collections Survey
survey was sent to all members on October 6, 2015. The survey closed on November 6, 2015, with a total of seventy-six (76) full or partial responses received from 136 members (a response rate of 55.9%)

DS: Very similar to BHL
MP: years ago heard from Hathi group that collections committee not as grounded, haven’t begun to deal with that BHL has been dealing with for years
TRS: impression - Hathi’s been focused on quantity over quality; now their survey is looking to improve quality; BHL spends time/energy invested in curation and gap-flling, good balance
DW: overall, SO familiar to issues that our committee is facing - reassuring! recognition that these are issues of the kind of work that we do; we’ve already approached and recognized - we’re on top of the game; major issue for them = costs involved with taking issues on; how does Hathi work with resource costs and staffing?
SK hasn’t been too exposed to Hathi situation, they wanted to review copyright issues - asked for 15-20% to participate from Cornell from volunteers; AGNIC working to make those from limited to full text search; not so much with Mann library; volunteers to serve for a full year for copyright review (CRMS) = pilot project and SK to keep in the loop with them
Hathi report talks about accessibility and this is important - we don’t tend to think about this

[ ] what is the status of BHL website accessibility?
SK can recommend WebAim as a tool
Tech Team: they haven’t discussed accessibility issues really…TBD
How could this report be useful for BHL?
MP: Could we have contact with Hathi committee about nuts/bolts issues?
TRS: Are we thinking about doing a survey?
NDSR to do some collection analysis
HathiTrust might be a great collaborator?!

[ ] Bianca to contact Hathi Collection CMTE collaboration
TRS has a friend who’s on the committee in San Francisco
Carmelita Pickett, University of Iowa, Chair
Sarah also knows Bryan Skib, University of Michigan
also ask about how long survey took

SL hasn’t done anything
Digitization technician just retired so can’t do internal scanning until position is filled
Linnaeus materials are only in-house
[ ] follow up on Linnaeus Link (also Leora and Judy)

[x] post notes from last call!
GT notes: Triangle Research Library Network Management Academy - Gil and Polly Khater attended “marvelous"=Sep 19, 2016=
Notes
Attendees: Susan, Matt, Diana, Don, Leora, Joe, Patrick, Lesley

Linnaeus Link
"an international collaboration between libraries with significant holdings of Linnaean material. It is funded, maintained and co-ordinated by the Linnean Society of London. Its main aim is to be a comprehensive, online Union Catalogue of Linnaean publications, facilitating research for scholars worldwide by enabling them to identify locations of titles with a single internet search."
libraries have to specifically add soulsby #s to match against library catalog records
some Linnaeus Link members are BHL members too!
Judy, Leora, Doug, Judy, Marty have attended past meetings
Leora to connect Bianca with Elaine from Linnaeus Link to investigate further what they would like to see from BHL
Bianca to see about submitting a pilot project idea to EC
spreadsheet sent out by Judy shows - but has some wonky data that needs to be cleaned up to fully understand the scope of the issue
BHL could help contribute to Linnaeus Link's efforts by digitizing gaps based on their catalog records
"partner" = holding institution; Linnaeus Link = small community
Soulsby bibliography = similar to Robin & Jackie's project with fern analysis

Copy specific information
Diana, Don, and Joe volunteered to enter copy specific information for some items they have already digitized and will report back via email
[ ] Bianca to follow up with Joel and Mike about passing this data at the time of digitization via Macaw and PMA - due by end of November
Lesley has an item we could add

Search terms
What do column headings in spreadsheet mean?
Could failed searches be an issue?
Downloaded vs. accessed?
when things are counted and where?

NDSR
Identifying gaps in our collection would be very useful
Is there an automated way to ID missing issues of a journal?
14 applicants for NDSR positions
positing up through Oct 5
to hire to start in January
it's not clear if NDSR grant can ask BHL Staff for work?

Aug 8, 2016

Attendees Kelli, Michael, Bianca, Matthew, Patrick,
Notes
&searchCat?
what does %Exit mean?
what do column headings mean?

sharks & shark maybe b/c of shark week
Nautilus - Michael heard something about this on NPR
where are people coming from - referral sites?
where people are in the world?
end of June MBLWHOI had a big Ernst Haeckel
shark week tweet from July 1 from BHL account
interesting but what do these terms tell us about collection development?
do we need to tweak metadata to direct folks to results we think they’re expecting
near spellings…an indexing issue - did you mean?
how often are people searching for taxonomic names vs. common names
known item searches vs. random searches
these search terms are just from general search not for advanced search
searches done by machine or human?
page views vs. time on page - looks like maybe some glitch or text mining - was there something wrong with the title or automated process?
gonna take time to see if it’s useful but good to have to question if useful
Cornell search terms influenced structural guidelines for where to put certain headings
Head of Engineering at UIUC analysis of searching software - where they’re coming from
BC to run several reports to noodle around and present next time
comparing search terms to subject headings?
it’s like reading tea leaves
it’s hard to know what are users are doing…
how can we look for “dead ends” in our collection?
how do we emphasize something
maybe it means people are finding what they’re interested in
maybe not…how can we tell?
knowing what the searcher had in mind…kinda hard to do
could this list of terms help our ingest criteria…?
search terms seem to be more subjects or titles, less so for scientific names…?

July 11, 2016

Agenda
Copy specific information

Wildlife Conservation Society has put together a list of 21 rare books that are not in BHL as candidates for digitization through the EABL grant.
  1. The great north side, or Borough of the Bronx 1897 New York North Side Board of Trade
  2. Travels to the source of the Missouri River, Volumes 1-3 (of 3) Lewis, Meriwether and William Clark 1817 London Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown

NOTES
Guidelines for Copy Specific Information have been updated based on notes from our discussion, see http://bit.do/BHLcopyspecific for more information
These new guidelines have been added to BHL's metadata requirements documentation for reference
Gemini issue 56392 tracks progress of implementing these changes for adding Copy specific information
Mike Lichtenberg to make the field visible and editable via the BHL Admin Dash first, also available via the BHL UI
THEN we will work on passing this new data via IA and Macaw pre-digitization
For now, the topic of Copy Specific Information is on hold until Mike is able to implement the changes required on the backend

Wildlife Conservation Society suggestions
WCS is contributing to BHL via the EABL grant project
EABL giving them $500 for IA digitization
MCZ holds most of the titles so they will be digitizing
This will help dedicate the $500 that WCS receives for digitizing high priority items such as the 2 titles listed in the agenda above (that MCZ does not own)
Committee decides AGAINST "The great north side" - Not relevant
"Travels to the source..." by Lewis & Clark has a great deal of potential however...
WCS has the 1817 edition, there is already an 1815 edition in IA that we could ingest
Patrick to review the 1815 volumes and report back - these may be sufficient to cover the content, maybe not
UPDATE: "I’ve done a little more research on the Lewis & Clark title that WCS was interested in digitizing (Travels to the Source of the Missouri River, v.1-3, 1817) and I think that in terms of content, it’s a good choice—lots of detailed observations of wildlife. Apparently the 1817 edition is almost identical to the 1814 and 1815 editions.
However, I looked more at the volumes already in IA (1815 editions). With the exception of two that were contributed by the NYPL, they seem like they were scanned from copies, and they’re low quality. NYPL did v.2 and v.3, but not v.1. So I think it’s still worth digitizing the set that the WCS has."
Bianca recommended to Patrick that the WCS move forward with the digitization of the 1817 edition. Thanks EABL!!!

June 13, 2016

Copy specific information for item metadata, see working doc
Decisions needed:

Technical development status update, see http://biodiversitylibrary.countersoft.net/workspace/464/item/56392

Notes
Attendees: Don Wheeler, Diana Shih, Leora Siegel, Gil Taylor, Leslie Overstreet, Trish Rose-Sandler, Bianca Crowley, Matt Person,
“Copy specific information”
1. View Volume
2. Copy specific information
3. Copyright & Usage
4. Download volume

Grace Costantino to determine palate for color
Decision “Copy specific information”
only display if available
yes allow for now for post-processing
Diana suggests not including information about library location
anything that’s missing from the copy should be described in the copy specific information
especially for rare materials
not so much for general collection
don’t want to upload entire local notes field - has to be selective
LO has a list of stuff that might be useful and things that are not
what building it’s in, call numbers, not useful information
with rare book records there are always notes fields that have edition specific information - but these notes apply to every copy
copy specific information from local notes
binding and housing no
annotations, variants, marginalia (esp. if we know who), wrappers, canceled pages, yes
LO has a number of categories she’d like to see included
BC to put guidelines in metadata guidelines as well as collection development policy
several copies of a specific rare book, if e.g. ”Darwin former owner of AMNH copy” this is useful to know, provenance and previous owners important for possible association with marginalia
any kind of inscriptions, bookplates, signatures, esp. if author or significant person as sender or recipient are all worth noting
very helpful for certain types of researchers
simple declarative single sentence
don’t have to write essays about these things
sometimes need to explain why you’re adding the copy specific information
“variant issue: see record”
how far do we want to explain the issue in BHL vs. alerting people that there’s more information in the record
would we need a link in this copy specific information field?
maybe not, more of an exception to the rule
fields in bib records are free text
to help BHL users, we should try and standardize language as much as possible
base standardized language on categories
“Inscribed by:”
“Variants…:”
LO to include categories in her list…
simplify, standardize and condense
(optional) field
inform KT and JC about possible changes to pick list to accommodate this down the road...
is JC editing pick list for volume info?

May 16, 2016

Attendees: Connie, Gil, Joe, Bianca, Kelli, Don, Robin, Matt

BC to take Joe’s notes into copy specific info doc
Yes good to include, lots of important info that would help users discern info about specific copies
might be tricky to get data, some of it in holdings info, some in catalog
anyone against?
“copy is slightly warped” - not useful
“Thomas Jefferson signed page 65” = IMPORTANT
have to be on a case by case basis, only see where necessary but might make it hard to implement
yes putting information into item metadata - would be better for case by case via PMA
note like “Annotated by Alexander Agassiz and Elizabeth Agassiz.” for http://biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/1810#/details (let’s say it was digitized by MCZ)
Maybe another block between copyright & usage and download volume - only display if present
What if there was comments on individual volumes under Add Comments - but might be buried too deep - would only be available if someone clicked on it
best to do something with least amount of clicks, display it if it’s there automatically
folks might blow through it if they have to click on something extra
if we deem in important enough to put in there
one more click, one more thing, to put in there
include in PMA and Macaw at the time of digitization
our group would need to provide some recommendations
all of MCZ’s in holdings record, but other institutions might be different
local notes typically go into 590
free text about anything that could pertain to your local copy
might be a good starting point for guidelines? JdV: anything is fair game
yes we should have some guidelines about what to include
chart with good examples vs. bad examples
(MCZ has a book bound in human skin!) Destinies of the soul
Model for MP’s idea is Charles Darwin’s library - panel with annotations to give you more information at the page level - only want to pursue for pages where notes appear on the pages they’re referred to
BC to run it by ML
would you want to search by copy specific information
no MCZ doesn’t allow search on the holdings data…
work on display for now and work on searchability later if really a need be - DW leaning in direction of search, it’s a tease to not make it searchable or linked
link to that page from the note…?!
comparing BHL to a library catalogue can be dangerous - based on antiquated record system…do we really want to model ourselves on this?

May 2, 2016

Attendees: Robin, Gil Taylor, Barbara Ferry, Jackie, Leora, Susan Lynch, Selli, Connie, Bianca

new SIL folks Barbara Ferry (Head) and Gil Taylor (Asst. Head) - going to be managing more BHL things going forward from Natural and Physical Sciences Libraries
Robin to be transitioning off
Jackie to be transitioning off as well
Leora part of collections committee now b/c of NDSR grant fellow
collections focused fellowship
meeting about grant to come, about 6 months out
Susan Lynch stepping in for Don today as he was out of the office

CBG has artworks but not cataloged, most in books
RE portrait gallery - Alice Tangerini has her own botanical database
a lot of stuff held at museum level

BC to finalize artworks doc and email all EC
NEG - Chair
CR - Vice Chair
JS - Secretary

NDSR - 5 projects, 5 research fellows
Leora/Christine’s fellow to be diving into collections analysis and gaps
BC: knowing what we have may help us understand what we lack
first meeting set for next week
grant doesn’t start till June

SIL will convene off line to discuss selection for BHL@10 collection

BC to contact all else not on committee
all committee members to pick a book for the collection (see link in agenda) over the next 2 weeks
people like being able to define noteworthy the way they want to
Catesby a good choice b/c not something people can look at easily but worth looking at
BC listserv: Add Barbara and Gil, Remove Jackie

April 4, 2016

Attendees: Bianca, Jackie, Robin, Lesley, Matthew, Diana, Don, Trish

Notes:
Need recommendations for BHL@10 campaign collection
Goal to get 1 suggestion from each Contributor as to which title or item is their most unique/interesting/noteworthy contribution to the BHL collection
(NOT counting: U of Southampton, RBG Edinburgh and Cambridge)
Vote to cancel next call and review the BHL@10 collection work in May, due by end of May
Review of outline for Partners meeting talk: BC to list collections committee accomplishments based on the 10 from the Nov staff meeting with additions from this year = Visual Resources doc
JC suggests adding Gemini stats for permissions about age of issues and average time from issue creation to closed
JC and RE also suggest including their fern collection analysis work as part of talk - yay!

Check in on VR doc
BC not comfortable turning in a doc that does not present a fair summary of discussions thus far
How do others feel?
Group wants to move forward with document in its current version with some last minute tweaks
OK to turn into EC
document elucidates issues and does not resolve which was our task so OK
it helps put arguments into a framework for decision making
DW approved use of his quotes in doc
JC reviewed revised version and provided new comments
committee went through a few of the comments together on phone and BC will follow up

Mar 21, 2016

Attendees: Jackie, Bianca, Don, Matt, Connie, Diana, Kelli, Susan
Notes
Diana having trouble calling in - BC to follow up
Linked open data ways to navigate between BHL and specimen databases
our area is really hand drawn things
can we use the terms about archival materials
archival materials have lots of different kinds of materials, such as photos
but how do we draw the line

one of the questions that needs to be addressed is how to handle photographs
Generally folks think that specimens should not be included…
not trying to make visual resources a priority, trying to address needs that some of our partners have presented
partners want to be able to include limited collections that they have

we will not bring in mass digitized images of specimens
linkage between BHL and specimens important but not within scope of BHL collection
millions are being digitized around the world, already underway, e.g. Global Plants Initiative - don’t duplicate these efforts

beginning part of doc does capture what we’ve been grappling with
good to see what EC may be asking the BHL to do
original material vs. reprinted…??

maybe too many questions, some of the questions aren’t quite answerable
state vision/mission as one - make as statements
model represents
model limits us
we have to think about what our mission/vision is and how the model needs to be structured to meet our mission
think beyond our model
what to do now, vs. what to work towards in the future - priorities?!
model should be subordinate of the mission
we’ve outgrown the original model
mission is to deliver the resources
if we are getting tripped up because our shoes are worn out then we need a new pair of shoes
what is the priority on our tech team for making it possible?
what is our priority for finding funding for this work over others?

chart really reflects pros/cons
biased towards cons
change mission to model
emphasize BHL audience - reference Grace’s documentation
not trying to limit audience but trying to determine
we can’t be everything to everyone - not achievable!
users are asking for better ways to discover visual resources
bhl built for books but not a con - the model, not the mission
check in on Friday with committee and see where we are
put pros/cons together as a convo rather than a chart that separates

Mar 7, 2016

Attendees: Bianca, Don, Matt, Diana, Connie, Judy, Lesley, Joe, Trish

Need an executive summary with main points outlined
Summarize results and important pros/cons with Appendix at end
break it down into appendices to make it palatable
Connie to help with final edits
Consider incorporating comments
Artwork is the beginning of species descriptions
could broaden mission to be a bit more generic
to be more inclusive
“published and unpublished content”
there’s other stuff that we are doing that isn’t strictly published
need language that is “big and generic”
expand vs. change
point out to EC that we are suggesting an expansion of our mission statement
BC: our mission is supposed to help focus our scope of work/goals and thus our collection. not comfortable expanding our mission just to include a new type of content...
language needs to be the right language
what would option 1 really look like?! need better examples
Hollis Plus, Internet Archive, SI Collections Search, Europenana, WorldCat
need a different viewer for Artwork, need to be able to rotate
not a good idea to shoehorn things into an existing platform that wasn’t made for it
Tech Team thinks artworks needs to be something for 2.0
TRS: How could we bring in illustration metadata - how could we make page level metadata searchable?
provide summary of comments - not verbatim
enough commentary so far

Feb 22, 2016

Attendees: Bianca, Lesley, Matt, Susan, Don, Kelli
Agenda:
Notes
Progress with "Contributor" in BHL user interface (Mike L.), Administrative Dashboard (Mike L.) and documentation (Bianca updating)
All occurrences of "Contributing Library" or "Institution" in BHL UI or Admin Dash now "Contributor"
Bianca has updated Copyright, Metadata requirements, Licensing and Copyright wiki page, Macaw guide with new language
Joel to address change in Macaw from "organization" to "Contributor"

NYBG example of artwork in BHL was cataloged at collection level in MARC
most information is available via "Details" tab in the MARC Notes fields (5XX)
BHL does not have searchable Notes fields (and not all 5xxs displayed, see http://bit.do/BHLmetadata for specifics)
Susan reported that there was a truncation issue originally that cut off notes after 200 characters
Since July 2013 this has been updated to 2000 characters, ML estimates that approx. 3500 records affected by truncation
He can pull reports to guide Contributors on how to fix their records but programmatic clean up of these records would be too time consuming

MP: not sure how you define artworks in the BHL context
example looks like data more than art
one person's art is another's science; what is art vs. science?
record looks great, created to fit into BHL's model of "book-like" items
so much work has gone into flickr, significant grant $
so much visual representation these days for science computerized ==> "so beautiful, it's art!"
so much work to do yet in BHL, not there yet with published books
to add to existing illustrations in BHL would be great (such as providing a way to do an image search)
KT: MP has good point, might be semantics but shows
we need to expressly define things, things that are primarily illustrations
good example of things scientists want to see
need to be very specific about collection development policy
what about unscientific interpretations of dinosaurs? where's the line?
BHL monsters exhibit! successful content in BHL b/c that's what people thought at the time would be very different if those illustrations were published today
[x] BC notices NYBG example has Genre = Book meaning something amiss in MARC re: collection level cataloging - turns out BHL UI only allows for "Journal" or "Book" to be displayed. Collections are displayed as "book" - I will be submitting a Gemini request to change this
What about a one page book? SL, LP, BC say this wouldn't really work within BHL's current model b/c of search result sets being muddied
DW points out not all illustrators captured for NYBG example - have to look at notes to see them all, only 2 "authors" listed
BC: NYBG example is a book-like item! Remembers MBG had a similar example Wildflowers of Ecuador http://biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/97606#/summary
[x] BC to load BHL Singapore example into beta, poss. 1 page book examples
[x] BC to also load AMNH example via Macaw that Diana sent
surveymonkey survey was confusing and not worth presenting to EC
what about presenting straw poll?
may be difficult to know what criteria needs to be met without defining artworks
what does EC want from us? see our charge on our Committee homepage
What about presenting the straw poll options and impacts for EC review? Sounds good
[ ] Everyone on Collections committee should take straw poll
What's EOL doing about artworks? good to provide as an example for link out option
[x] Bianca to update committee list to make sure we have quorum of poll votes = "a quorum in an assembly whose membership can be determined is a majority of the entire membership, definition
Aim to have final doc to EC within a month - present examples relative to options from straw poll below, even mockups helpful
doc due COB 3/21

Straw poll



Feb 8, 2016

Attendees: Bianca, Matt, Jackie, Diana, Don, Kelli, Susan, Robin, Lesley
Agenda:
BHL also serves as the foundational literature component of the Encyclopedia of Life. Stick to the main mission until it’s accomplished. Up-grade, improve, enhance, yes, as with copy-specific info, but don’t divert the focus when there’s still so much to be done."
- ConnieR ConnieR Feb 18, 2016I disagree with Leslie--some of the artworks we have are directly related to species descriptions and not always published. Thus I think it is an important addition to the collections in the same way as field notes and other archives collections."

Notes:
Yes, change "Contributing Library" to "Contributor"
applies well to organizations that are not libraries such as BHL Europe, BHL SciELO, BHL Singapore, Smithsonian Institution Archives
makes a lot of sense also for Expanding Access grant contributors to come
Bianca to check in via email with folks to confirm
Bianca to update LOTS of documentation once this takes effect!

Committee members felt they didn't have appropriate expertise to provide opinions on survey questions
very difficult to get consensus, maybe it's more about just providing enough information for EC to make decision
Goal to summarize data and let EC decide
Best to provide actual example for EC review
How much tweaking is really needed to get artworks into BHL?
Providing data is the best way to go - framing as uncertain b/c of lack of expertise
[ ] load 3 samples of artworks for review into BHL beta site, NYBG, AMNH and BHL Singapore
To do that, the steps are:
•    Upload the items to IA as usual.
•    Edit the items at IA and add a metadata field named “noindex”, with a value of “true”.  That will remove them from the IA search indexes and prevent the regular BHL data ingest from picking them up.
•    Let me know the IA identifier for the items.
•    I will load the items into the BHL beta site and make sure the search indexes are updated.
MIKE
Need to get gut reactions from tech team about estimates on time, resources - not something Collections Committee can assess really
Susan Lynch has great point that our Committee's perspective and expertise is: about usability and how effective material is presented via BHL website
How do other websites exhibit artworks?
Would be nice to identify some good examples...

Jan 11, 2016

Attendees: Bianca, Connie, Joe, Jackie, Trish, Don, Patrick, Diana, Kelli, Lesely, Matt, Mariah, Susan

Notes
Collections Committee should make a recommendation as to what to do about Artworks
Should we fill out the decision matrix in the doc? Yes if you'd like
Bianca to review decision matrix methodology in preparation for next call
All to read Artworks document as priority number one for next few calls
Is there any place that we are planning to go that having records for Artworks could cause a potential issue? Good question, may need to add to document
Copy specific info discussed on Sep 20, 2015
MCZ shared some examples but need more to decide if it's something we want to include in the BHL UI and how
Biggest complaint about copy specific information from rare book librarians, Jackie to send examples
field book data could easily work, Lesley to send examples
focus on how this copy specific info would work for our current UI not BHL 2.0
email BC with examples
BC required to work on adding new Licensor field with BHL Tech Team
add Gemini ticket number to todo list, CR to follow
Article metadata thus far has been passive, we get what we can from Biostor - can we be proactive and get articles for specific journals?
maybe this work falls under purview of Expanding Access grant
institutional publications would be a good article metadata start for example
2008-2009 MCZ Bulletin and Breviora in spreadsheet form - ready to go...maybe good test bed
BC to report back, part of her duties for the the year and will check in with CC if successful, will need recommendations for potential journals to article-ize
Expanding Access grant to pre-vet from one-time Contributors - gather more collections that are relevant
Connie on Membership Committee
One-time contributors to resolve as needed - esp. agriculture for example
Requests processed through Gemini in some way
Google spreadsheet about new contributors currently going and to enter into Gemini where needed
Gemini also as deduping mechanism - need to be searchable...
SIL currently adding new tickets for monos and serials
what about already digitized content for inclusion in BHL, e-content
what if someone has 500-thousands of items - need to be able to add these titles easily to Gemini - adding individually would be cumbersome
deduping goal is to avoid cost of duplication
new contributors should have some presence in Gemini for discussion by some group whether Membership queue, collections committee review, expanding accesss grant
Ingest criteria may need to be adapted; found out over weekend that rogue IA contributor uploading LOTS of in-copyright items, ingested to BHL, Rod Page notified us, we removed and notified IA - they are looking into it

Dec 14

Top 10 Titles from RJB with most Items
Title Title Count In BHL?

External Title Counts
American Museum of Natural History Library - 6077
Biblioteca Digital del Real Jardin Botanico de Madrid - 6349

External Item Counts
American Museum of Natural History Library - 6172
Biblioteca Digital del Real Jardin Botanico de Madrid – 6426

External Segment Counts
American Mosquito Control Association - 7383
American Museum of Natural History Library - 3
American Ornithologists' Union - 19
Amphibian and Reptile Conservation - 33
BHL SciELO - 21913
BioStor - 9
Kathryn (Drechsler) Finnegan and Gregory Finnegan - 155
Nature Kenya, East Africa Natural History Society - 607
Organization for Tropical Studies - 6049
Pensoft Publishers - 2815

Notes
Attendees: Joe, Lesley, Jackie, Don, Matt, Connie, Kelli, Diana
Welcome new members!
Jackie Chapman - point of contact for all SIL digitization workflows including BHL
Lesley Parilla - cataloger w/ Field Book Project

FYI Decision from last week to use “Volume details” - any major disagreements?
What about when it comes to unpublished or manuscript materials like correspondence?
“Item” is used in many ways in archival community
“volume” could be seen as a grouping of letters for example so it’s still useful
No objections voiced. Great! Decision!

Committee also voted to adjust “View Book” to “View Volume” for consistency
[x] Bianca to submit Gemini requests for these changes

Connie External links update
external links have been a bone of contention even to the point of waffling on policy
always want content IN BHL
BT sometimes we can’t get content IN
No mas! Decision: No new externally linked content in BHL
Aim is to get current content linked out, IN; work to get actual deposits
[ ] BC to update collection development policy
accept only FT content into BHL from now on
BHL SciELO? primary database of articles
in theory we want to no longer have external links but practically speaking it’s not easily possible to put them into BHL

IF we have physical IN BHL, then no external
IF links & external link? Then…
Diana, Bianca, Jackie, Joe, Connie
Decision to eliminate external links if they duplicate content already in BHL
such as Annales des sciences naturelles [ 82 http://biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/6343#/summary
Frontqueria could go on License Ask queue for the future, leave alone for now...not a priority
Goal to try and get RJB as partner (part of BHL Europe issue)
Goal to get AMNH link out materials IN BHL
Short-term solution: de-emphasize external links so long as there is a note about de-emphasis somewhere
[ ] Bianca to add notes about de-emphasis to public collection development policy
JC would prefer a new tab for external links; Bianca: likely not worth doing extra work to change organization in UI and tabs esp since we will no longer be bringing in external links.
Next call Jan 11 - happy holidays!

Nov 30

  1. finalize "Book details" discussion --
  2. De-emphasizing third party links -- from meeting notes:
    • We’ve also talked about de-emphasizing links to external content in search results. They might cloud the search results for things in BHL, which will have all of the services BHL provides enabled. What do people think? Most in favor of de-emphasizing link. Jackie: I get lots of questions about what the external links are. Would it be possible to add another tab for external links? Bianca: Right now the question on the table is just about search results lists. But that’s a good suggestion that we can approach. Our committee will continue to discuss this.
  3. BHL Staff Meeting collections action items
  4. Review Committee ToDos
Notes
Attendees: Joe, JJ, Matt, Susan, Bianca, William, Diana
“Book details” - Bianca, Diana
This might be good enough if we were to edit the 431
What if we had something more neutral?
“Details” - William, Matt
“Item details”
something else?
“Book” might be too much of a pigeon hole term
“Volume details” - JJ, Joe, Matt, Susan, (Diana)
BLANK?
“Volume details”
change 431? Yes, it would be good to do so…
[x] submit gemini issue for 431 serial volumes

[x] BC to get some reports together about different externally linked contributors
WU not sure how often
seems like just a few things every now and then gotten during weekly ingests

Action Item review
Funders should understand that we could use our time more productively
Maybe we could use old British Catalog as a guide
MCZ has a copy, maybe MBLWHOI does too?
In print (10 volumes)
Tom Garnett used to have a ballpark for these numbers
[ ] BC to pull up Tom’s old numbers
Using WorldCat / OCLC for analysis?
Can we come up with parameters for what we think we could analyze?
Maybe we can take sample pages from British Catalog…
Can we put Rod Page on it?
Maybe he has some good ideas…WU sent link to 11/2011 Rod Page post in response to King et al's "Towards the bibliography of life"
Some groups have a list of publications - the matching against BHL is the tricky part

Nov 2

Attendees: Connie, Diana, Matt, Joe, JJ, Don, Kelli, Bianca
Agenda

Notes
"Book details" provides less information than "no volume description" for serials so it's really not a good option for serial volumes
how often do we have serial volumes with no volume information?
likely only with ingest titles, rare that BHL partner contributions lack volume information
[x] BC to get report from Mike of serial volumes without volume descriptions - how many? get list
Can we use a very generic phrase like "Item details" or "Volume details"?
Let's see how data from Mike looks first

Staff Mtg collections update
Oops, sorry forgot to include topic of de-emphasizing third party links! Now added to topic outline above
collections statistics: interesting to present on ingest vs. partner contributions and top contributors, also what about how collections are used?
some logistics questions about traveling to/from hotel
some folks definitely interested in virtual attendance
what are your spirit animals?
Make sure to tell new folks at staff mtg about Collections Committee and who we are and let them know they can join in! - of course! added to topic outline

JJ had idea about adding start year date (derived from MARC 008s) to supplant volume information where no date/info is provided
This works for monographs but with serial volumes the 008 date is the start year for the publication not the volume
still good to look at data we have to see if there is some better way of cleaning up volumes that lack description information

Meeting on Nov 16 canceled, talk to you on November 30

Oct 19

Attendees Diana, Trish, Robin, Joe, Connie, Kelli, Don, Bianca
Agenda

Notes
"Book details" no brackets, no parens, OK!

Yes, de-emphasize (Don, Connie, Bianca) Adheres to policy that third-party links are not our preference and we want to prioritize content IN BHL over this external content
Recommend that in search tips link we explain that de-emphasis is happening with externally linked content
Gives folks incentive to put content IN BHL
No, don't de-emphasize (Kelli, Diana) De-emphasis means that users cannot trust search results since they expect all content to be treated equally but it isn't; users can already see that the links are to external content
Ambivalent (Robin, Trish, Joe)
A few folks have suggested making the "View external" more obvious
[x] Talk about at BHL Staff Mtg, otherwise Members can decide
[x] Bianca remember to ask Trish about RJB Madrid contributions - lipscombb lipscombb Dec 2, 2015 on Tech Team mtg 11/2 reported that last RJB load received 8/2/2015 - a handful or 2 at a time

Other topics for BHL Staff Mtg
[ ] Connie to bring to Members

Reviewed new section on Partner Collections in updated collection development policy
Folks to suggest edits via email

Including UIUC ledgers
Archival and fieldnotebooks stuff OK in BHL so long as "book-like"
generally up to the BHL institution's discretion what they want to include
onus on Contributing Library to ensure open access compliance
Possible that specimen ledgers may have sensitive information that cannot be displayed via open access
ledgers mostly legal-size
what about copyright status? Does UIUC want this content to be publically available for anyone to use?

Oct 5

Attendees: Kelli, Joe, Diana, Don, Susan, Matt, Bianca
Agenda
Notes
"Book details" to replace "no volume description" yes, everyone seems to like this new phrase better.
To replace volume information where value is NULL
Default text = simple global UI change
[X] Bianca to request that Mike make the change via Gemini

IMLS Grant awarded to NYBG
awarded $800,000 over 2 years
Digital content ==> BHL ==> DPLA
involving esp. Harvard MCZ, NYBG, MOBOT
MCZ to hire a Community Manager to do outreach and request permissions for grant
NYBG to hire a metadata support person
potential for a lot of content to come in
Oct 1 start with kick off meeting Nov 16-17 with Martin, Susan F., Susan L., Trish, Connie
Is there a wishlist already of potential content?
Yes, queue of stuff in Gemini, Bianca to send list out to folks
Is there a priority list of titles?
6 institutions named in grant = priority focus: NHM LA Co., Wildlife Conservation, Bronx Zoo, &etc.
Focus on first time contributors, small publishers & scholarly societies
Grant to explore...
US based or international?
Which scholarly publishers should be approached first?
What should priorities be?
Not one-offs, have scholarly societies continue to contribute, they would upload themselves
Born-digital + digitization via IA
bridge out to groups that cannot contribute otherwise

De-emphasizing third-party links
Diana, Kelli, Don, say no...user wants most accurate results - doesn't matter where content resides
Bianca, Joe say yes..
RJB particularly problematic - have 6,426 items
[x] Does RJB continue to load items via OAI? Yes
- lipscombb lipscombb Dec 2, 2015 on Tech Team mtg 11/2 reported that last RJB load received 8/2/2015 - a handful or 2 at a time
If we do de-emphasoze then we must state somewhere that externally linked content is de-emphasized for clarity
Can we deaccession RJB where there are dupes IN BHL?
What about journal of AMNH? This is linked into BHL via external links but shouldn't it be ingested?

Sep 20

Typo in phone number :( Only Joe and William called in. Discussed a bit more about what kinds of data would go into the "copy specific information" field if we had one display in the UI.
There is an existing field called "item description" in our database where we can enter data
Tasks are to
1) figure out what kinds of data would go in this field to know how much real estate we need in the UI to display this field appropriately
2) propose possible locations for this field in UI
Joe recommended keeping information like "Incomplete" where it currently lives in the "Volume Information" fields
Need examples from folks about the kinds of copy specific data we want to record - Joe sent some
MCZcopyspecificinfo.xlsx

Sep 6 No call Labor Day Holiday

Aug 24

Attendees: Joe, Kelli, Don, Trish, William, JJ, Marty, Diana, Matt

Notes:
Majority vote...
Primary concern is eliminating duplicate bib records
It would be nice to change "no volume description"
take out "no"?
JJ usually puts in date or edition statement
how about just "book" and "book information"
"book information" Bianca, Kelli, Trish
"book details" Joe, Kelli, William, JJ, Trish, Marty
"book" Joe,
"read me" Don
Especially with merged items
Copy specific information would be great,
copy specific info like B&W images vs. Color images for example
database has field "item description" and "notes" WU to check field descriptions to verify, at Item level
Admin Dash shows "notes" field in Items editing screen - could this be displayed in UI?
If so, then where?
What kinds of text would we want to include? "Incomplete" could go in this field maybe...
Concerns about real estate and length of text for copy specific info
maybe we could have a list of various generic cases that would apply...
Provenance info could get added but it might be long
[ ] Copy specific info useful for rare items - ask those folks
Questions about what kind of text would go into copy specific info
[X] BC to check in with Tech Team...wishlist item for whenever there's time!
Ideally, all 30 RJB Anales hits should be merged into MBLWHOI record (8068)
Is this a one time harvest or periodic? RJB is an ongoing harvest
So if other duplicates cropped up they would have to be merged as well
If OAI protocol is set correctly then whatever's already merged would stay put, according to identifiers
If identifiers are new numbers then it all gets undone - RJB was sending new numbers at one point
This goes for any OAI provider - if they don't keep the identifiers consistent then BHL...table for now...
BC: seems like a lot of work to keep up with all these potential merges with little benefit, Anales is one of many RJB titles

BC oh sorry I forgot about...the topic of de-emphasizing!
Do we want to de-emphasize external links in BHL search results?...Some folks say clearly "Yes"
Others on the fence...there might be times when the externally linked content might be to better copies
Marty: maybe better aggregated volumes via the external links than even BHL partner contributed/results IN BHL?
There's no way to tell via the OAI feed if the external link goes to aggregated content
Idea would be to treat external link de-emphasis just like Canadiana, de-emphasize external links in search results always at bottom of list regardless of sort order (author, title, year)
[X] BC to check in with Tech Team to confirm this is how it works - DONE, de-emphasis would only apply to relevancy ranking
Search by species name would
AMNH is currently partner with external links but Diana says OK to have them de-emphasized

Aug 10

Attendees: Connie, Bianca, Robin, Joe, Diana, JJ, Jackie, Kelli, William,

Agenda:
  1. Robin Everly and Jackie Chapman to present on BHL and collection analysis relative to ferns (30 min)
  2. External links merging and deemphasizing?
  3. Sharing BHL collection development policy with global partners

Notes
Conference at SI where Jackie/Robin wanted to interact with potential/actual BHL users ==> had to put a poster together and get some research done!
Robin used Fern Bibliography for English language books pre-1900, not journals
Trying to estimate how well
authors were thorough on their presentation of fern literature for the scope re: rare, reprints, editions, &etc. ==> very comprehensive for scope
Had 5-6 weeks to do the work
Spreadsheet showed that out of about 302 titles...72 in BHL, 102 not in BHL and not held by BHL partners, 128 not in BHL but available by BHL partners
24% of books from bibliography actually in BHL...
Robin had to rekey everything from bibliography into spreadsheet!
What would it look like taxonomically? Would have have most of the fern species represented?
Jackie had to research 4 different classes of Pterodites - used Catalog of Life (based on World Ferns) to download class names lists - and focused on genus
downloaded all BHL data (yes! all the data)
Jackie taught herself Python to crunch the BHL data against the controlled vocab provided by Catalog of Life
Polypodium most hits, 306 genus names
None of the missing names, only 10, are from pre-1923 literature
93% of pterodite genera represented in BHL
Permissions really helped with taxonomic coverage
Data can tell us some things - next step = talking to subject experts to analyze data to understand more about what the data is telling us; is the distribution of genera correlated to taxonomic makeup
This kind of analysis could really be extended to other groups of organisms
Each group of organisms has its own idiosyncrasies influencing the literature
CR: Would be great to do this for other groups if we can find good bibliographies, also goes to show how important it is to have current materials
Jackie reports that taxonomic part is fast b/c the script is ready to go (thanks Jackie!)
But the hard, time-intensive work is putting the bibliography together
JJ: maybe If we could digitize the bibliography, maybe we could parse the entries automatically using Google refine or other coding
Robin: didn't mind rekeying the bibliography b/c really helped with subject specialty knowledge, this book would have been impossible to automatically parse
Users impressed that librarians were invested in the literature based on the scope of the conference
Originally Robin/Jackie thought about adding many more fields to spreadsheet such as whether or not the book had a TL2 number, &etc.
...50 hours estimate to rekey bibliography - 302 books in bibliography total
This was 1st time in 11 years that conference was held. SI has one of largest fern collections. Dept of Botany happy to see active librarian at conference
Robin could make suggestions for streamlining bibliography creation for BHL analysis going forward
Jackie continuing to learn python, genus level is nice level of granularity for now
Google docs was a good way to work collaboratively
SIL was working on developing TL2 as a parsed bibliography but Joel hasn't had time to address

External links & merging
Decision: Majority vote for treating externally linked items just like any other items in BHL meaning...merge the bib records together and provide access to both items (one of them will just happen to be an external link)
BC to add this note to our title merging documentation, see http://bit.do/titlemerge
For ex.: http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/89200#/summary and http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/94498#/summary
Other folks would prefer to get rid of externally hosted duplicate items altogether
External links are just like any other extra copy so useful to have. Not ideal that they duplicate existing BHL content but it's like a "back up" if the IA copy is inaccessible.
Some questions of how exactly to describe the volume information for items in BHL that are monographs or books -- is there a way to improve this description?
BC to check with Tech Team
Volume information field strictly for volume information so how can we capture notes about copy specific information?
Is there a Gemini issue about this? BC created one (although this might be a duplicate of an existing issue), see http://biodiversitylibrary.countersoft.net/workspace/206/item/56392

Jul 13

Attendees: Bianca, Kelli, Diana, Joe, Marty, JJ, Matt, Don,
Agenda:
  1. Collections Browse page updates from Feb 9 and Mar 9:
    • DONE -- change "Browse Our Collection By:" to simply "Browse by:" | Gemini 49999
    • DONE -- suppress "beginning with All" | Gemini 50000
    • TBD -- Include browse by # option in A-Z menu such as with Contributor browse menu | Gemini 50002
    • TBD -- Where letter option from A-Z menu does not exist, gray out or suppress in some way | Gemini 50004
    • TBD -- Include 'back to top' link at bottom of BHL collections browse page - sounds good...maybe need to do this for all browse menu pages | Gemini 50003
    • DONE -- Increase line height for collection descriptions so they're easier to read (see Columbia library's example below) | Gemini 50005
    • TBD -- Some collection descriptions too long - BC to adjust collection descriptions to 3-5 lines and check in with folks in charge of subcollections for approval
    • IN PROGRESS -- Introductory text on the collections browse page - include in white area (not blue banner): "Want to discover more? These thematic sub-collections of BHL content have been curated to help our users take a closer look into biodiversity related topics of interest. Enjoy!" | Gemini 50687
    • TBD -- Improving navigation and differentiating b/w collection list and collection landing page (if applicable); "further information" button for collections isn't intuitive that it leads to a landing page with more information about the collection -- there are 2 places to click to get a book list vs. a collection landing page...what about a "more..." link in the collection description?! Yes! Everyone likes this option, BC to ask Mike and William to suppress further information button in favor of being able to link to the landing page directly via the collection description
      • BC to experiment linking directly to landing pages w/in description - yes, I can link to collection landing page in description but presence of HTML/text in the "Landing Page Content" field automatically makes the "further information" button appear, I don't think I can control this button from showing/not showing
      • are there 2 columns with further info button? can we collapse into one and get more space for collection descriptions?
      • BC to fix BHL China link - DONE but looks like their website may be down?
    • TBD -- Tabled major change suggestions for a later date
      • Include image icons for each collection such as http://library.columbia.edu/find/digital-collections.html - iconic image is repeated on collection landing page - images and text blocks all about the same size - can navigate to collections via clickable image or collection link
      • Add splash pages to Contributor Browse page
      • Add Contributor as drop-down option under Advanced Search - we currently do not index content by contributor
        • Would this mean that institutional collections are dropped? BC: Varies institution by institution - I will be following up with folks to check. For some they may want to wait until Contributor functionality available, for others it may not matter
  2. Artworks in BHL follow up, review questions document, Martin would like a survey of BHL partners
Marty: Yes, up to members to decide about artworks ultimately and document raises questions about going down this path
Reasonable to put in front of members for discussion
Kelli: Very thorough; groupings of questions around topics useful; good to have all questions as it lends weight to whether or not it makes sense to incorporate artworks in BHL
What do we mean by artworks?
Define artworks!
MP: Do we mean film/sound recordings? What is an artowrk?
DW: Reach out to other organizations that specialize in artworks to ask them about defining
TRS: How does BHL want to define artworks? What is appropirate for BHl and our users?
2 part definition: What artworks are appropriate for BHL? What artworks do you have?
JdV: assume that working with 2D still images much much easier for BHL tech development than audio and 3D!

Jun 15

Attendees: Susan, Diana, Don, Joe, Bianca
Considered further what it might mean to include artworks in BHL
- lipscombb lipscombb Jun 16, 2015Joel Richard helped me start outlining some questions that need to be addressed:

Artworks in BHL gdoc link

Jun 1

Attendees: Marty, Diana, Kelli, Joe, Don, Matthew, Trish

May 4

Attendees: William, Bianca, Matt, Joe, Diana S., Don, Trish
Don not sure how it was incorporated into catalog, happened back in 2011, (DW knows Eckel has other resources too). Why does it need to be linked into BHL? There are other important things necessary for BHL, this resource is out of scope. If we do this one then others will follow. Linking out to born-digital - there's so many things to link to - how do we want to manage them? Need to document why this resource is/isn't appropriate. We have language about dealing with collections/publishers of materials but not one-off e-resources...
BC to respond to user to say thanks but not now
BHL is a print-based online library
PenSoft is digital as well as print publisher - they produce a lot of content that BHL can harvest over time; MCZ has 2 print pubs of theirs + online as well
Raises questions about the expansion of BHL into another content realm, this issue is a seed for future issues in the long run - do we want to start laying foundation for this now?
Doesn't fit with original intent of BHL, we don't have optimal way to display
Decision: No for now but good to think about for later as BHL moves to working more in concert with digital resources
- lipscombb lipscombb May 12, 2015 my response to Richard Zander and the corresponding Gemini issue to track this topic going forward:BotanicalLatinDictionary.pdf
Gemini issue requested digitization of NYBG archival seed & nursery collection. MBG had already set ground for this with Engelmann papers. It's now a logistical issue for NYBG. Not an issue of relevance but a question of how/when. NYBG to decide and Don to get back to user.
Beautiful! Blurs lines around having artworks in BHL. Does MBG have documentation about how they put this together? Could we show this to BHL-Singapore about getting their artworks in BHL...it could apply yes! Are we a passive host or are we opening ourselves up to e-"publishing"? Looks more like a portfolio than a book. DW says he can see us getting swamped with requests. BHL is not the publisher here, MBG is. Is this in flickr? Some pages have sci names (if typed and pasted on) but most do not, although could be added via Admin Dash.
BC to contact Singapore to say this is what I mean but saying "book like object" for artworks - DONE

Apr 20 No call, Bianca had meeting at LC. Email discussion re: including Botanical Latin e-resource

Apr 6

Attendees: Bianca, Kelli, JJ, Don, Joe, Robin, Matt, Diana, Trish

Mar 23 call canceled

Mar 9

Attendees: Bianca, Diana S., Matt P., Joe, Don, Connie, JJ, William, Susan Lynch
MARC Ind1 Note Type
500 General
502 Dissertation
505 0 Contents
505 1 Incomplete Contents
505 2 Partial Contents
505 8 Formatted Contents
510 Citation/References
515 Numbering Peculiarities
520 Summary
520 0 Subject
520 1 Review
520 2 Scope and Content
520 3 Abstract
520 4 Content Advice
520 8 Summary, Etc.
525 Supplement
545 Biographical or Historical Data
545 0 Biographical Sketch
545 1 Administrative History
546 Language
547 Former Title Complexity
550 Issuing Body
580 Linking Entry Complexity

Feb 23

Attendees: Matt, Don, JJ, Joe, Jackie, Trish, William, Kelli, Judy, Connie

Feb 9

Attendees: Bianca, Matt, Robin, Marty, William, Kelli,
BHL Singapore would like to submit art works to BHL? Technically speaking this is a whole other animal and treating images as just single page "book like objects" is not ideal; more of a fundamental change to BHL's data model. For the future of BHL, say "BHL 2.0" would we want to develop requirements that allow for art works?
Content of image is what would be found in a typical volume in BHL
Published or not? Original works? Could they create a virtual binding for it to be like a book?
Maybe EOL would be a more appropriate place for this work to appear, until BHL could handle it? JSTOR global plants might also be an option (but not open access)
Are images like this appropriate for the BHL Collection? Marty: "a resounding yes" Robin's not so sure, neither is Bianca
Could all 500 sheets get stitched together into a made-up "book-like" object? Yes but we'd have to add the scientific name per page to have the images searchable
What is BHL Singapore's goal?
Indexing the art works along with books within BHL's model doesn't really do the images justice
Kelli suggests thinking about a set of metadata standards for stand alone images for BHL; images are useful and will probably be a good addition to the collection
Question 1: Do we want to include images in the BHL?
Question 2: If so then how?
This is outside of what we've been doing
Shoot for ideal and ask folks to come up with parameters for including images in BHL and reworking the BHL infrastructure to accommodate
Don't jerry-rig it
Bianca says this example is like the case with field books where the metadata in BHL currently is not as rich for field books as we would like but so long as we can get the field books to fit into our current scheme then it's good enough for now
Are these images already a part of some kind of publication that already exists?


Report back on discussion re: Collections Browse page
Suggested Quick Fixes

Major Change Requests to review at a later date

Jan 26

Attendees: Bianca, Don, Kelli, Joe, Robin, Trish, Marty

Jan 12, 2015

Deduplicating seed and nursery catalogs - Cornell hosted WebEx - Holly Mistlebauer, Marty Schlabach
Holly Mistlebauer, from Cornell University’s Mann Library, will demonstrate how she merged seed catalog records from the National Agriculture Library (NAL), the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), and Cornell University into a single spreadsheet for use in determining what unique material should be scanned by Cornell. Holly will show how she used Google Refine to merge seed catalog company names that varied by institution and changed over time. An additional caveat is that Cornell has cataloged the seed catalogs as serials, whereas NAL cataloged them as monographs. Cornell also has “group” catalog records for seed catalogs for which Cornell has only a few issues.
Please see Holly's presentation slides https://cornell.app.box.com/s/qbssyqy29had7kp1pbwn
How many rows resulted from the Google Refine work? HM: We have just under 11,000 unique seed catalog companies between the three libraries…

2014 Notes

Dec 29 Call canceled

Dec 15


Seed lists are slightly different than seed catalogs - more generically lists of seeds or plants available from an institution for the purposes of exchange/offering
Since both of these types of materials are going into BHL should the seed lists be in the Seed & Nursery catalog collection or in a separate collection?
Discussed as part of Purposeful Gaming call a few months ago and Marty wanted to bring up with this group
Bianca thinks it would be good to include seed lists in the existing Seed & Nursery catalog collection but how are they used?
Marty thinks that the seed list use is similar to the seed catalog use and Don agrees
Non-commercial seed exchanges between botanical gardens and natural history organizations - like seed trade lists - can be used for tracking early descriptions of species
Usually not illustrated, not a lot of description but early seed and nursery catalogs were similar
Marty likes putting them all in one collection too - probably easier technically too
Connie - would we want to separate these for any reason...?
Challenge is identifying seed lists to make them into a separate collection but these need to be ID'd anyway in order to get them into the Seed and Nursery collection anyway...so can always create separate collection later if necessary
Currently seed lists coming from MOBOT - need to have Mike B. ID items/titles; currently "Delectus" seems to bring up a good set of seed list results - as far as Marty knows only MOBOT has been scanning seed lists - terms of grant that MOBOT would be contributing seed lists
Is NAL contributing seed lists? Marty hasn't seen this
Decision to include seed lists in BHL Seed and Nursery Catalog collection
Bianca to contact Mike B. about identifiers for existing scans to add seed lists to collection - DONE

Marty identified seed catalogs to be manually added to Seed and Nursery catalog collection at beginning of PG project
noticed that NAL scanning lots of seed catalogs
Mike L. identified NAL's subcollection of seed catalogs in IA and is semi-automatically pulling these items into Seed and Nursery catalog collection in BHL
Bianca proposes setting up a parallel process for Mike L. to replicate process with NAL collection to pull into Seed and Nursery catalog collection
Bianca to contact someone with IA to set up additional seed and nursery catalog collection in IA for ex "biodiversity-seedcollection" - DONE
Bianca to talk to Joel about passing this additional collection info via Macaw - DONE, need to "Add Row" and enter "subcollection" as field name
We need to decide what to formally call the collection and what the URL will be - Marty and Susan Lynch - plus a bit of descriptive info and can coordinate this with landing page for collection in BHL
Folks uploading to this subcollection need to have permission
How many seed catalogs are being uploaded? DW reports that it is very slow to upload to Macaw
Might take some time to get automated process in place - what are the due dates for the grant
Cornell hasn't uploaded content yet but has scanned 15K pages and NYBG has scanned 17K pages - but the uploading is the bottleneck
Seed and nursery catalog collection has plenty of stuff to supply PG proj. goals
Bianca to involve Marty and Susan L.; Marty also has an IA contact = Andrea Mills
Marty brought up interesting "twist" that maybe NAL would want to tag their seed lists w/in BHL seed subcollection?
Make sure MOBOT involved too esp. for seed lists - In Progress
NAL ingested items being tagged with biodiversity and hopefully going forward
new IA biodiversity seed collection could include other BHL partners besides PG folks - the more the merrier!
Bianca to follow up with Marty for a collection call re google refine and deduping seed catalogs among PG partners & others - could be WebEx mtg
NYBG has done great job with cataloging seed catalogs
NAL cataloging each issue as its own monograph ==> deduping complications!

Dec 1

Attendees: Marty, William, Jackie, Connie, Joe, Kelli, Robin, Diana, Don, Bianca
Discussion of how to incorporate Notes from MARC into BHL Title records, please see this google doc

Keep 525, 550, 580
546? Yes keep, often for serials - not accurate
Don says NYBG uses 510 for notes about citations and previous owners
No searchable Notes fields
Many TL2 entries in 510s for NYBG journal records
citations reflect standard bibliographic citation/reference
not a problem if notes become lengthy…many will be so anyway
helpful to have more info than less
not a problem for these NYBG 510s
add 545
Info in notes fields for local holdings vs. general use
local notes are supposed to be in 900s fields (also in 59X)
Notes changes apply to everything, after adding this all title records will have details tab
Can we add new notes fields later? Yes, takes work to have done but once done it’s relatively easy to display new fields
[x] Need to clarify w/ Mike L re: notes strings with mockups
examples RE to send
delimiters “|” help — for display only? OR how does it display with rec downloaded?
Added to details tab, can add to MODS, BibTex, EndNote in same way

Decisions for this discussion summarized:
MARC Notes Fields to include
500 General
502 Dissertation
505 Formatted contents
510 Citation/References
515 Numbering peculiarities
520 Summary, etc.
525 Supplement
545 Biographical or historical data
546 Language
547 Former Title Complexity
550 Issuing body
580 Linking entry complexity
Include Notes in "Details" tab and map to relevant fields in MODS, BibTex, and EndNote formats (it's good to be consistent where possible)
Yes, it's OK to concatenate subfields for a given Note field but use "|" to separate the subfields.

Nov 3

Attendees: JJ, Kelli, Matt, Joe, Susan Lynch, Don, Diana, Trish, Bianca

Agenda:
Notes
Small subset of abstracts available for articles brought in from CiteBank
No resources today to load more article abstracts but at least now there's a place to put them
Yes, contributor browse is plus!
Could we make institutions hyperlinks? These links should go to the institution's home page.
Don notes maybe some changes needed for NYBG name...to contact Bianca
Change "View All" to "View Titles" or "View Contributions"...maybe drop the "View" all together...
Have institution name link to institution homepage + "Contributions" link that takes you to all BHL content contributed by AMNH
BC to mock up
Noticed some inconsistencies between contributor browse content and collection by institution content
ANSP shows 17 in collection, 21 under contributor
Diana sent list of Notes fields to keep/ignore a while back, to resend to Bianca to compile for future discussion
Decision to display Notes fields in Details tab on BHL
Past discussions among Suzanne Pilsk, Joe, Diana, William, Jackie, Mike L., Diane Shaw (SIL rare book cataloger) -- where are the notes from these discussions?
Of course, different institutions handle notes in different ways
Need to define lowest common denominators for notes
TL2, Pritzel, 510 field $4 NYBG & HUH Citations - Don to think about an example
subset to discuss Notes fields? Joe, Diana, Suzanne, Don

Oct 20

Attendees: Bianca, Joe, Matt, Kelli, Diana, William
Agenda:
  1. Continuation of discussion re: how to display article abstracts and notes in the BHL UI. Please see forwarded email sent this AM from Mike Lichtenberg to the Collections listserv
Folks seem to like v.3 Sidebar best...with some additional questions/thoughts:
SegmentNoteAbstract v3 Sidebar.jpg
  1. If time, update on Serials Analysis work

Summary of What Mariah Lewis Has Been Doing with Rod’s Spreadsheet:
"I worked on going through a filtered version of Rod’s spreadsheet that focused on pre-1923 publications that were not in BHL. I double checked to make sure they were not digitized and in BHL (some of them were.) I also worked through the list and created a Gemini issue for each title. I searched in the Smithsonian catalog to see if SIL held the book that needed to be digitized. If I could not find the book in SIRIS (the Smithsonian catalog) then I did research on OCLC and find which BHL institutions held this book. A few of the BHL institutions who hold these titles were contacted during this process to request the title be digitized. Some of the titles or portions of the titles did fall into copyright so they were added to the copyright queue.
My final stats and findings were:
Of the 60 Gemini issues...

Oct 6

Attendees: Bianca, William, Don, Kelli, Connie, Marty, Trish, Matt

Agenda:

Abstracts for articles provided by contributors coming in via automated means (OAI)
Q1: Where should the links for "View Abstract" and "View Notes" go?
Decision: Preference for links on right hand panel under Article Links
Links for "View Notes" and "View Abstract" should have same look & feel of existing "View Article" link
What would be in the Notes?
TRS used Notes field to accommodate for one provider who had inconsistent author metadata
Q2: Where should the Abstract and Notes text be displayed?
Display as Pop-up or Overlay?
Usually overlays are centered - but maybe you can give them a place
Overlay intention is something that you read immediately and then go back to what you were doing, keeps navigation flow continuous
Pop-ups interrupt flow but there is the advantage that you could go back and forth b/w the notes/abstract + the article metadata
technically speaking development is the same, more of a design functionality thing
with overlay you can't navigate until you hit the close button
Could Abstract and Notes be displayed as part of Details view - adding functionality to expand/collapse is more complicated
Could Abstract be its own Tab in the UI?
Most bibliographic databases have abstracts included in the full record
Pop-ups are an entirely new window so you can drag it around the screen, make it smaller/larger
1) Pop-ups?
2) Overlay?
3) Display in Details Tab? Maybe this is an option?
Web of Science - search results has link to "view abstract" pops up below citation but still w/in search results
clicking on title produces full view of all metadata
BioOne might be a better example
4) What about displaying abstracts/notes in a text box in the right-hand panel instead?
Need to produce some new mock-ups and come back to the group for a decision on Q2

Sep 22

Attendees: Matt, Kelli, Connie, Joe, Don, JJ, Marty,

Agenda:

Notes
Connie Rinaldo, Jiri,Frank, Chris Sleep and Jane Smith met in London last week
BHL Europe content and moving forward
Jane has offered to try and find resources to get BHLE moving along
Got to get content into BHLE portal first
Content has to be in OLEF standard
THEN they can work on getting the content into a format that IA can accept
Things have been very varied: different flavors of MARC, different cataloging formats in general
normalizing has been very problematic
resources are needed to explore how can we turn variable formats into a single format that can be ingested into IA
dealing with orange bags galore!
even MARCXML and MARC21 don't always convert as you expect them too
resources are a problem but folks are committed to the work of getting this done…

Collections analysis project needs some dedicated resources and Martin trying to secure them via a possible CLIR fellow
MK asked for potential questions that could be investigated once this resource is available
Please see the questions listed in the document linked via the agenda above.
Folks on call had suggested these additional resources in support of our collections analysis activities:
Marty: One of my colleagues developed an abbreviation tool fondly referred to as JAbbr. You can see it in action on our “classic catalog” http://catalog.library.cornell.edu . Select ‘journal title abbreviation’ and enter an abbreviation to try it. It is not just using a list/database of abbreviations with their full titles attached, but rather is looking at the abbreviations as word parts and trying to find matches. More at http://jabbr.mannlib.cornell.edu/about .

Don: Link to BPH journal abbreviation database http://fmhibd.library.cmu.edu/fmi/iwp/cgi?-db=BPH_Online&-loadframes sometimes it works and sometimes it is frustrating…

Kelli: Up until her retirement, last year, the former Biology Librarian was trying to keep a fairly comprehensive Field Guide bibliography. Currently you will find it here: http://www.library.illinois.edu/bix/fieldguides/index.html It is being shifted to a Bibleaves set up, but right now THIS database links to WorldCat and in this way holding information can be identified. I didn’t know if this would be of use as BHL builds that aspect of its collection, and also as we see what we might contribute at UIUC.

Aug 25

Attendees: Joe, Diana, Jackie, Bianca for Enum & Chron follow up discussion

Joe created this wiki page based on Harvard AACR2 enum std document
wiki page is distilled version of longer document
minor differences b/w MCZ & AMNH - Harvard uses colons vs. AMNH uses commas
AMNH doc: bhl--Enumeration abbreviations for Bianca.docx
also discrepancy about spacing
choose whichever one is used more in BHL - SIL uses colons, MCZ has been using colons, also based on wiki page
DS thinks colons used more too - comes from LC (Joe says colons from ANSI stds)
decision: go with colons
AMNH decided not to use colons b/c not as easily eye readable as commas
Follow the std and use colons
not about doing retrospective edits, going forward use colons whenever
use colon to separate levels of enumeration
so…spacing…standard calls for no spacing - MCZ to make things more eye readable
v.1 1972, it's a readability thing - space b/w enumeration and chronology
SIL has been following this for BHL as well - if there isn't an abbreviation then space like with "Heft 1"
JC: for sequencing, when items auto dropped in BHL, if v.1 vs. v. 1 if read differently - how is BHL system reading the vol info when coming into the system. If there's something we could do to make auto sequencing easier then that's what we should do
Joe to ask Mike about this
DS: it does make things easier to read so makes sense so use "v.1 (YYYY)"
good to have ideal and try for ideal going forward but no need to retrospectively correct
when merging titles or contributing volumes to fill gaps - make sure that no matter what standard enum/chron is in then make all consistent, not necessarily to standard
when doing gap fills what do we do?
Best Practice for gap-filling do… JC wants to prioritize consistency
but what are folks responsible for?
Decision: If gap-filling for fewer volumes than present then prioritize consistent enum & chron; If gap-filling for more volumes than present in BHL then edit enum & chron to standard; Gap filler responsible choosing how they want to be consistent based on path of least resistance rule they for editing all enum & chron and resequencing
Least amount of work possible to make things easy on our users
if it's a lot of work, put it in as a low priority portal edit
but if gap-filler does not have time to edit to standard they should submit a portal edit queue so long as they submit their volume info to standard
Joe to fix wiki page
BC to cut & paste Joe's summary into our how-to doc and refer from detailed doc back to summary
Go with MCZ's document as detailed document, as is
SIL and MCZ put in dates for monographic sets but AMNH doesn't
path of least resistance - if there's a year add it in
Joe to compare abbreviations document w/ wiki page for summary - Joe to DRAFT and send to group
summary will forever live in enum & chron how-to
introduction and enforcement
1) add link to documentation in Gemini emails
2) Jackie to remind folks in Gemini comments
there are rules for filling out vol info so this is just a convention folks need to follow
Partner Meta App page should include this info - have link to standard - BC to add link to standard
introduce during September staff call
Joe willing to introduce
JC and AH have divided and conquered in past
BC concerned about asking folks to do extra work
Can assign folks to help via assignment in Gemini
woah…Bulletins of American Paleontology doesn't use colon to standard, should be = instead b/c parallel numbering, but no need to go back and change
remember not doing retrospective edits
if you were doing a gap-fill for this example you'd conform to the current format so that your vol info is consistent
Collections Committee decided that if the vol info was "readable and usable" for users then it was sufficient and not worth time retrospectively editing (see notes July 25)

Aug 11


Diana, Don, Bianca, JJ, Connie, Kelli, William,

OCLC fast headings
will be filtered out, but
still "in the room, but away in a far corner - not as easily accessible as they would be directly in db"

Serials Analysis
See Rod Pages Data Analyzed_Final.xlsx (at top)
Wow great job JJ and William!
still need analysis for collections committee list but in order to do analysis need ISSNs
in order to get ISSNs for these... might just be easier to manually add
WU: fuzzy searching on title via OCLC db not helpful
DW recommends using BPH online - union list of serials to perhaps get identifiers for titles that don't have ISSNs
JJ to follow up on Connie's suggestion to eliminate dupes b/w CC list and Rod's list but keep in sep tabs
Bianca to compare 148 Rod titles with Gemini...
Then to add to Gemini
blog post...

July 25


Notes
Connie, Kelli, Don, Mariah, Jackie, Bianca, Matthew, Robin, Diana, Trish, William,

filter out OCLC fast headings
fast headings are an indexing tool - supposed to be simpler

Enum & Chron:
some situations where things defy the rules, do the best you can
Joe, Diana, Jackie, Bianca to synthesize wiki page and Harvard doc into 1
Diana has cataloging volunteer guide she can send

Jackie wants all to be consistent, Kelli agrees, do it when we have time
Connie: it's not just SIL that is inconsistent, we all have weird stuff
There's a lot of clean up needed!
Bianca thinks that as long as vol info understandable from the user perspective then it's good enough
however, these kinds of straight forward enum/chron edits are useful for teaching examples
in examples reviewed, what needs to be edited? looks fine from a user perspective - Bianca, Don, Robin, Connie agree
Jackie: what do we do with gap fills? what volume info standard do we use?
Jackie: does our enum & chron data affect download of volume info in a big data sort of way…==> Q for William?
decision: leave in portal edit queue with low priority for when someone has time
originally it all looked quite different - this is a progression
readability and usability is most important
for big data: ideally you'd want to have everything parsed out - but so much that is out of control that it's not worth worrying about
there's so much that we need to clean up that we have higher priorities
single title, sometimes the volume information is inconsistent - tried to be true to the volume in hand
Jackie concerned about entering volume information
decision: if volume information is not readable and usable then edit
decision: if it is readable and usable then it's good enough
Jackie: need to enter volume info into BHL to the standard at the beginning!
enum and chronology std needs to be incorporated into workflow doc
decision: if user request then edit

June 30

Question:
  1. When multiple editions of a work are available for scanning, should our goal be to have them all scanned?
  2. If so, then say editions 1 and 3 are scanned, what would the priority be to have the 2nd edition "gap" filled? (low, medium, high)
    • BC: As with many BHL digitization decisions, it really does come down to the contributing library to make the call
    • MP: scanning other editions would be on a lower priority compared to no previously scanned content
    • MP: isn't it really a case by case basis depending on the title and the significance of the succeeding editions?...which one might consult with the BHL librarian colleague who is most familiar with the title.
    • JJ: my quick comments about digitizing other editions of the same work, are that they are low priority unless deemed historically important or requested specifically by a user.
    • MS: One additional comment—a decision will be influenced by the nature of the work and the differences between editions. Some ‘editions’ might be little more than a new printing, but referred to as a different edition.
    • Joe, Kelli, Connie agreed
  3. Should we merge different editions together, see http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/search?searchTerm=+A+conchological+manual#/titles? - lipscombb lipscombb Jun 30, 2014 Not sure we have time to really do this plus I don't believe this is standard cataloging practice either right?

Cataloging and documentation Intern FYI (Bianca)

Don, Connie, Matt, Joe, Diana

Editions questions, see Gemini issue 47864
It really depends when it comes to decisions about scanning multiple editions
Decision: Scan editions as requested, if you know that an additional edition is significant then send for scanning as well
Scanning editions is not like a gap-fill situation
(CR notes that as a general rule the 2nd edition tends to have the most editions made)

Re: modifying title metadata to accommodate for edition information, see Gemini 47948
Joe added subfield 245 to title in order to articulate edition information in title field
user actually requested edition information in the title field
not kosher for cataloging
easier to read but redundant as edition information already available in the record
!!Too much work to keep this up!!
Nice to have, maybe pub date more prominent
You can sort search results by year to see editions in chron order
Remove Joe's edits for consistency?…No, we should leave it. It's done so let's not go back. (Lots of things in BHL inconsistent anyway).
However, must be consistent going forward
Decision: leave edition information alone in the record as it should be passing into the BHL record via the original MARC

Diana to send AMNH cataloging guide she developed for volunters
Joe to send segment documentation that Chris C. put together
Macaw documentation is coming along (now with Keri)
John Mignault leaving!

June 16


Notes (Attending: Bianca, Martin, Marty, Joe, Diana, JJ, Kelli, Matt, Trish, William, Connie)

Serials Analysis: JJ combined 5 different lists into one for comparison; needed data clean up; no success with Sherpa/RoMEO
need ISSNs for BHL lists, JJ working on this in spare time, but a lot of old titles don't have ISSNs anyway
searching by title against the BHL corpus in batch process, using OpenRefine to query titles from list and BHL to identify if title is already in BHL
can do title search as is but will be fuzzy matching at best
Could TAG help JJ? MK asked William to ask TAG and WU w/ coord w/ JJF
pre-1923: titles that ended prior to 1923 and thus pub domain
through 1923 - years in advance of 23 but also through 23

collections analysis:
long standing interest of EC and members
BHL to provide some clear data
BHL has covered certain portion of biodiversity corpus
BHL has gaps in a specific taxonomic area
BHL needs funds to try and complete a certain taxonomic area
maybe a CLIR fellow
thorough analysis of our bib data to run against bib sources out there such as OCLC or Hathi
What kinds of questions can we ask of the collection?
What do we have in BHL?
What's missing from BHL?
comparing what we have against OCLC/Hathi tells us how we holdup against them but may not tell us what we have compared to biodiversity literature in general?
Is OCLC the best place to compare? Most universal?
Are we interested in only Western language materials?
Hathi itself is a conglomeration of the universities that participate
OCLC would be more comprehensive than Hathi?
Hathi sends comparisons to individuals who participate - July 2010 Hathi Overlap-Reports
Can we have OCLC Research do a similar analysis w/ BHL?
Is Gallica in OCLC?
At least one African dbase of publications
OCLC is a good place to start but need to look beyond that
How does the BHL collection compare to our own individual institutional collections
Not about figuring out HOW but what would we like the resulting data to be
1) How does the BHL corpus compare to OCLC?
2) How does the BHL corpus compare to individual institutional collections?
We have LC subject heading and call nos. that sketches out what we want BHL to contain
Need to better define gray literature…?
Connie would be interested in volunteering to come up with a list of questions to start, Bianca, JJ too, Kelli too!
What about the scan list?! We're not even sure we could get data out of the scan list
Could this analysis help us put together better deduplication tools?
Need a list of what resources we have available: scan list, bhl corpus, &etc
Turn around time…let's plan to have a list of questions for discussion around the August call 8/11 or 25…
MK to meet w/ CLIR folks = CLIR fellows (Council of Library and Information Resources), behind DLF
Harvard University has a computer science class that takes questions kind of like this
Indiana U has some folks that do data visualization
Posting to mailing lists: DataScience 4 librarians, Code4Libs
MK would like to put money behind this to get a finished product in a timely fashion
Kaggle.com - analytics awards
WU knows some folks working on data visualizations for their post docs

no call June 2

May 19

Perkins collection, should we include in BHL? http://library.soton.ac.uk/perkins and example https://archive.org/details/perkins59680848
How should we handle analytics in BHL? See Gemini issue 47605
Summarize RJB link loop issue and results
Updating public collection development policy
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/search?searchTerm=Nuovo+giornale+botanico+italiano#/titles

Apr 21

Connie, Diana, Marty, Matt, Don, William, Bianca
Reviewed rescan guidelines within collection development policy and language looked great. A few key points:
Purpose of language is to provide guidelines regarding questions of rescanning for something that is already digitally available, typically these rescan requests come into Gemini or are verbal requests from patrons in our libraries
Basically it's up to the library to decide if they want to spend their scanning resources to rescan, it's not up to the Collections Committee
Remember, these are GUIDELINES ONLY not absolutes

Discussion of Connie and Don's DRAFT language regarding third-party links in BHL
In response to "CiteBank problem" = moving functionality intended for BHL's article repository and metadata indexer into the BHL website; includes article access, making user-generated PDFs accessible, incorporating 3rd party links; ruled out idea of letting users upload content themselves due to copyright concerns
We have agreements with 3rd party content providers for a number of reasons, e.g. SciELO is a global BHL partner but we have no way to bring their content INTO BHL so we link out
RJB doesn't want to deposit materials
no way for us to bring in content at article level just yet...article access provided currently in the form of metadata pointing to individual pages of scanned books within corpus
In order to provide access via BHL, we've brought in the metadata and linked out to content hosted on 3rd party websites for SciELO, RJB, and Pensoft
We need to have clear criteria for future third party candidates (BC concerned about potential future candidates since currently no resources to facilitate loading of content)
This issue potentially plays into potential pricing structure for non-members; Connie and Bianca have worked on documents about this such as this
Bottom line: Collections Committee STRONGLY PREFERS that we have content IN BHL
Our language needs to reflect this strong statement of preference
WU: SciELO converts to HTML and puts articles online ==> 3rd party link in BHL, when they cannot do this they digitize from the print ==> possibly load via Macaw? they ran into some problems with Macaw, their MARC records were "thin"
language recommendations from the group: beef up preference statement; remove last statement; at some point need to clarify pay wall issue...; cut out #4 altogether
links that are already in play OK, BHL members should decide what they'd like to see as far as future 3rd party linkages
Decision was made to try linking out with the providers we currently have agreements with, a cautious step
question of trusted repository vs. metadata aggregator still exists...
BHL cannot support customized ingestions of content; harvesting metadata via OAI-PMH is the simplest way to "incorporate content" into BHL
still need to think about when do we charge for services...

Apr 7

discussion with Bianca, Matt, Connie, and Robin regarding guidelines for rescanning, see new language within our Collection Development Policy here

Mar 24

Agenda:

Notes
Kelli, Connie, Becky, Don, JJ, Diana, William, Trish, Marty,
Regrets: Matt P.

Our group welcomes Kelli to the calls! She started with UIUC in July; Betsy may join calls in the future; MJ Han metadata expert may be able to help BHL too

Author data & notes status: Go with manual merging of notes fields
BHL will incorporate more MARC XML fields in summary & detail displays in BHL UI for authors
records to include more detailed author info and will now include notes too!
plan is to take out local annotations
MS: retro or only for new records? - WU: reports that yes, we can incorporate author/notes data retrospectively
There will be some search limitations however, cannot search on author detail or notes
ML to do this when he has time (maybe a few weeks)

3rd party links
did not make a general decision, made specific decisions
SciELO, PenSoft, & RJB only for now
have decided to include these but not on the rest
don't want to become a links farm
need to review contributors on a case-by-case basis
not discussed at members meeting
there are some 3rd parties to link out to
prefer to have content directly in BHL but it's not always possible
still need criteria for linking out vs. scan for BHL
BC: so we shouldn't be proactive yet? No, there may be institutions to approach
1st choice is always to have the content IN BHL
bring potential candidates to EC, then to Members for review of potentials, before considering for ingest
still a place for something in our policy - may selectively link out to providers
DW: we should have a statement, case-by-case, selective process, we'd prefer to ingest over link out, not quite codified
CR: volunteering (& Don) to help write a statement about this
difference in discoverability w/ linked out vs. on site content mainly w/ taxonomic names, but if FullText search implemented then we're really losing out on linked content - we can only search across the metadata for this linked content
Mike L. can help w/ OAI set up
Diana and B to follow up on AMNH content that was brought into CiteBank via OAI for the future

Rod Page's list JJ has done a lot of analysis comparing BHL Zoo priority list to Rod Page's list of titles to date and found...
JJ: having control numbers for titles to do comparisons helpful
only 1 field that all title lists have in common = title field
ISSNs in Rod's table it helped get additional data fields like OCLC nos. & chronology
how far do we want to go with the analysis?
BC & JJF to regroup and get back to the group in a month

members mtg collections topics: ingest vs. linking out
getting all gBHL content in sync - more tech/political issue than collections issue
doing effective collection analysis / gap analysis
we are partially doing gap analysis via Gemini, analysis by users
but we need analysis for grant opportunities, &etc.
make this into an intern/student project…yes, understood it's a resource problem in many ways
could we use our form for getting funding for an intern project?
grant coming up on NY for national digitization stewardship residency
DW sent link out
need a definition of what project is and deliverables - CR & BC (to direct questions to WU & TRS) THIS WEEK
also issue of whether or not to rescan externally linked content
isn't most content we are linking to in © so that we couldn't rescan?
most content is OA but yes that would still limit our rescanning
policy that SciELO follows, prioritize content that's born-digital and marked up, otherwise digitize under "BHL model"
Pensoft is born-digital
RJB is legacy literature
WU wrote up blog post about the externally linked content in BHL and requests that folks take a look and send their comments

lots of interesting stuff re: reprint collections but not sure about it's direct route into BHL
thus Digi form not really useful in this case…
form is for approaching individual donors - sort of thing that Nancy Gwinn does, or development offices
Nancy Gwinn doesn't know until someone fills out the form but no one is using the form

Feb 24

Lead: Matt Person
Agenda:


Regrets:
JJ, conflicting call.
Attendees: Matt, Robin, Joe, Diana, Don, Connie, Trish, William, Becky

Notes

Global BHL update
Connie reported on the Global BHL meeting that took place in Melbourne and Lorne in late January and early February.
The meeting was well attended with every BHL country except Egypt represented.
Martin created a blog post about the BHL Day they held, which involved staff and volunteers who have worked on BHL in Australia:
http://blog.biodiversitylibrary.org/2014/02/bhl-day-at-melbourne-museum-opening.html
Discussions included inclusion of reprint materials, strategic planning (such as partnerships with GBIF and EOL), etc.
Connie will coordinate the development of a Global BHL Treasures exhibition to increase gBHL’s visibility and reach a broader audience. It may include highlighting an exhibit or a museum item, but more likely a certain book, or journal or illustrations. The BHL Europe Exhibition tool will be used and Jiri Frank will provide training.

Engler reprints at California Academy of Sciences and similar collections
Becky brought up a request by a CalAcad staff member to include a large collection of reprints collected by Adolf Engler. The reprints have valuable annotations and the collection also includes doctoral dissertations by his students, drafts of manuscripts sent to him, programs of meetings, etc.
The group agreed that this could be a valuable addition to BHL – just like the Darwin Library -- but expressed concerns about copyright issues and funding for the digitization. Becky will look into potential sources of funding.

Matt also mentioned that MBL lost a large collection of reprints due to flooding (many years ago), but MBL still has drawers filled with thousands of catalog cards describing the lost reprints. Digitizing these may be helpful as well.
Tomoko added that such collections could provide very useful as research resources. She is also talking to LC Director Billington about digitizing manuscript collections at LC.
Connie also mentioned as an analogous collection: MCZ’s Ernest Mayr’s reprint collection. She has been similarly concerned with how to digitally present this corpus.

Tomoko had three questions:
  1. about scanning runs with gaps. She was made aware of the BHL scan list where member institutions can bid for missing volumes. http://bhl.nhm-wien.ac.at/scanlist/index.php Robin added that Jackie Chapman is great at tracking such cases.
  2. about dealing with items already digitized by LC. She should talk to Martin about implementing Macaw.
  3. about the manuscript collections already digitized by LC. See above.

William reminded us of an issue that had been tabled during the last meeting, namely, what do we do if a user asks BHL to digitize something that is available externally because they are unhappy with the external experience (could be quality, could be lack of BHL tools)? Opinions generated during the Jan. meeting were reiterated (not enough $, don't do it; People seek the trusted resource of BHL, so we should do it; prioritizing issues; we link out to trusted repositories, so shouldn't it be ok?; many items previously scanned lack foldouts). Consensus is to say yes because BHL is a curated collection.

Matthew proposed to draft a document which would discuss how BHL partners reach decisions on these issues on a case by case basis, and the document would list about a dozen or so elements are considered. Robin and Connie volunteered to help. Any other volunteer should contact Matt.

Matt also raised an issue we could address after Bianca returns: Is there some point at which we may want to casually discuss how far we’ve come and where we are going?

Jan 27, 2014

Lead: Becky Morin
Attendees: Becky, Diana Shih, JJ, Marty, Dan, Connie, William, Trish
Agenda:

Notes
William brought up the OAI/PMH harvest of links from SciELO to be linked out from BHL- this existing content is linked the same was as other external data- the material is not ingested into BHL. The metadata is brought in, but the externally-linked items don't have the user tools applied (like taxonomic name finding).
According to William, we don't have the ability to link directly to pages in the articles, just to a higher-level.
It would be too labor-intensive for BHL to harvest all the material (instead of just metadata for linking out- it's a manual process and very costly.
Collections Committee advised William to go ahead with pulling in the SciELO metadata

This brought up a side topic: What do we do if a user asks BHL to digitize something that is available externally because they are unhappy with the external experience (could be quality, could be lack of BHL tools)? Opinions:

JJ gave an update on Rod Page's list. There are some data problems, which she outlines here:
+Serials+Analysis.
Among the issues:

How are Authors displayed in BHL?
Authors Display in BHL Title Pages.pdf
The following group pulled the above document together:
Marty Schlabach; Diana Shih; Joseph deVeer,; Mike Lichtenberg; Jacqueline E. Chapman
They brought to the CC questions regarding the following:

The Scanlist. It would be nice to have a newer/cleaner/more inclusive one, but no one's losing sleep over it and we have bigger fish to fry.
Collections Committee calls canceled through rest of December


2013 Notes

Dec 2

Attendees: Joe, Connie, Marty, William, JJ, Bianca, Matt, Diana,
-- Prelim title aggregation. Need clarification on combined through-23 zoology priority list.


How would we like author data to be displayed? Which subfields to include and how should they be defined?
Look at this example in BHL and the same record in SIL's catalog
How do we want the author information to display?
Is there anything from preventing us from displaying the subfields? WU: yes we have this info in the MARC records but it hasn't been loaded into our BHL database, we can display this information but b/c of the inconsistencies of the entries, e.g. "ill." vs. "illustrator" it could not be searchable but this may be OK
Can we collapse the same name?
DS: subfield entries really depend on the library creating the original record, different libraries have different practices, not standardized
We need the qualifying information in BHL to support the name
It would be useful to show the subfield $e for the 700s
It would also be useful to show the subfield $t for the 700s but these analytic entries aren't clear unless you have the 500s
Could we use the summary tab & details tabs to display this information differently? Yes!
In summary display, don't duplicate author names but include subfield $d
In details display, include all author name entries w/ all subfields $e & $t as well as the 500s notes fields
BC: we might need to show subfield $e in summary display for clarity to differentiate authors from donors/illustrators/etc.
Confusing that all authors and added authors listed under "By" heading in BHL
Might just be easier to display the whole record
Some volunteers willing to work with William & Mike?: Diana, Joe, & Marty to work with William & Mike - William to convene the group for a discussion, involve Jackie (& Suzanne, if avail)

Rod Page titles
JJ performed comparison analysis between Rod Page's list of titles and BHL zoo priority titles , see spreadsheet linked above
There are titles on Rod's list that overlap with our work from the past
JJ has added pre23 Botany, pre23 Zoology and post 23 Zoology titles to the spreadsheet, to add thru23 titles to spreadsheet once (needed clarification first)
all titles provide on list good indicators for priority scanning
Rod's list did not have titles for many ISSNs
JJ to continue with analysis and report back in January
BC: Grace entered all pre23 Botany and Zoology priority titles to Gemini, these issues are marked as priority=major, looks like 45 or so are still open, approx. 120 entered to begin with
Note: There are over 40 Collections issues in Gemini marked as priority=minor which may be from the thru23 Zoo list...I'm not certain -
lipscombb
lipscombb
lipscombb Dec 2, 2013

Nov 18

Attendees: Matt, JJ, Robin, Marty, William, Trish, Don, Bianca
Agenda:

Notes
Rod's response about his journal title analysis:
"BioNames is indexing several sources. Mostly it is based on the ION database ( http://www.organisnames.com ). I’m am trying to link every publication of a taxonomic name to a digital identifier. Many of these publications are linked to BioStor articles, but I’m also using other sources (e.g., CrossRef, Mendeley, etc.)

The list of articles that appears for any journal in BioNames is typically a subset of the complete set of articles, i.e. it will be just those articles that publish a new animal name. For example, http://bionames.org/issn/0035-418X lists articles from Revue suisse de zoology that have published a name, whereas a more complete list can be found on BioStor http://biostor.org/issn/0035-418X . The latter is a list of every article I’ve located in BHL for this journal so far (in this case using a fairly complete bibliography for the journal which you can see here http://www.mendeley.com/groups/591531/revue-suisse-de-zoologie/ ) .

For the links and identifiers I am querying the BioNames database and counting for each reference whether I’ve got a DOI, BioStor link, JSTOR id, or any other identifier for each article. I also score whether I’ve found a link to a PDF and/or a URL (i.e., a web link that isn’t a DOI, JSTOR id, etc.). This helps me get a sense of how much work I have to do to “fill in” the gaps (i.e., how many articles I still need to locate online).

For articles that aren’t in BioStor I have a whole bunch of methods for locating them. I use CrossRef APIs to look for DOIs, I have a large library in Mendeley where I have basically begged, borrowed, or stolen bibliographic data (e.g., by scrapping web sites, harvesting DSpace archives, etc.), cleaned it up, then added it to Mendeley. I then have code that takes bibliographic citations and matches it to ION records. There is also a lot of manual editing for more obscure records.

I hope this makes some sense. In an ideal world my approach would be to:
  1. have a complete bibliography for a journal
  2. have that journal completely scanned in BHL
  3. use tools in BioStor to locate each article

Each step is problematic. It is often hard to get a complete list of articles for a journal, BHL may have limited coverage of a journal, and bibliographic and OCR issues can make locating articles *cough* interesting."

Action Items
Compare BHL's Zoo list past work w/ Rod's current list
If something from Rod's list at pre-1923 and not in BHL, submit Gemini issue
But if in-copyright…whole other strategy

Cornell, for the time being has stayed away from serials - b/c when they scan serials, they do mark up at the article level but BHL cannot accommodate this yet ==> could this be made useful retrospectively?
Value of having serials in BHL is certainly great but w/out article access, user experience compromised
similar situation w/ BHL-Europe - they've marked up content too
trying to look into a particular format (OLEF) to accommodate this content, used by BHL-E and BHL-Egypt
not sure how easy it would be to associate Cornell markup w/ particular format
WU risking saying that BHL could take a look at Cornell's markup to evaluate how it could be incorporated
OLEF is wrapper for info that we already have in MODS and Dublincore but also includes article & pagination information - BHLE needed schema to wrap around various formats to synchronize for ingest into their BHLE database
We have made metadata in BHL available as OLEF using OAI-PMH - we can publish metadata
Working w/ OAI-PMH harvester to accommodate ingesting OLEF format
Format that we'll use back-n-forth to synchronize metadata among gBHL nodes

DLF forum summary - Connie worked w/ DPLA rep Mark Phillips on brainstorming/hackathon "working session"; presented an introduction to BHL, discussed our collections analysis challenges and provided BHL datasets
One person in particular showed great interest in BHL data: John Mark Ockerbloom (great contact!) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mark_Ockerbloom - Chair of Discovery Interface taskgroup for DLF
John wanted to compared pre-coordinated LCSH from BHL to Hathi Trust and taught Connie about LC's extended biological classification...Have other folks heard of this?...No
TRS wonders how session fared for DPLA rep Mark Phillips
WU reports that BHL's name file is so big now that you have to have something special on your computer to be able to deal with it - we're getting to the point where we're having problems with the amount of data that we're providing
TRS: How does this affect our users? Is there a way to break up the file?
WU: Yes, need a solution for helping users

Playing December 2 call by ear but hopefully will have so long as Baby Crowley doesn't come early, otherwise calls for December cancelled
Becky taking January 27 call, Matt taking February 24 call
What do folks want to discuss for future calls?
Maybe more about comparing Rod's list to BHL?
Who's willing to do analysis for Rod Page's list? WU, JJF
1,418 titles on Rod's list see
Rod Page List.xlsx
Rod Page List.xlsx
Rod Page List.xlsx
(thanks JJ!)
JJF to take first stab at comparison and will report back to collections list & notes
MS: notes that high % of titles are Entomology and Cornell would be able to scan and contribute if BHL can accept marked up article content

Resolving author duplication

Summary of discussion to resolve author duplication issue (Jackie, Suzanne, William, Mike)
JC was trying to resequence - but couldn't b/c there were duplicated authors
the way we display authors, illustrators, donors - the way this info was displayed was changed in March UI merge w/ BHLA
Mike fixed
But still other cases of authors repeated 2+times - some authors have additional info that we're not bringing into BHL, such as the subfield e of 700 fields
Another subfield that indicates and analytical entry that BHL is ignoring - so authors of subtitles, chapters are being displayed alongside regular authors
We cannot change the structure right now
BHL-Australia is synchronizing with our metadata thus we cannot update our structure until they have someone to fix synchronization on their end; they will have support in January to implement sync changes
In the meantime, BHL to turn off author-duplication validation error but only temporary until author structure can be fixed and synched w/ BHL-Au
Still need to look into details of author duplication further
SP would like BHL Collections Committee to talk further about how we would like authors to be displayed
BHL example: http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/64232
Oh look there are dates now next to authors!
BHL looks at authors and sees them all as the same but the actual MARC record show that they're not the same, see for ex in SIL's catalog
BHL is not displaying information about illustrators, publishers, &etc.

Possible Topics for Next call:

Nov 4

Attendees: Joe, Don, JJ, Jackie, Robin, Diana, Matt, Suzanne, William, Bianca
Agenda

Rod Page journal analysis
IPNI got back to WU re: all their titles, to see if we can repeat w/ IPNI info what Rod has done; need to revisit past work & compare; yes, we can get an increase in taxonomic ROI
Can Rod give us his analysis? We'd like to know more about his pre/post 1923 scope for example; keep in mind everything listed has ISSNs ==> subgroup of a subgroup; how exactly did he pick these titles? What does he think are priorities for BHL scanning?
Bianca to contact Rod with committee's questions
BHL may have gone through many titles already and exhausted scanning relative to copyright cutoff, condition, etc.; digitizing up to 1923 is all we can do for now since we need permissions for post-1923 and need to have a process for bringing in already digitized content
We could use a volunteer to review Rod's list w/ more information to solicit publishers
DS: a lot of titles that are pre-1923 are already in BHL - Great!
Rod just became GBIF Science Coordinator - could GBIF help us down the road?

Cataloging issue relative to multiple repeating authors, see http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/64232#/summary
See Gemini issue 31808 with more detailed info: http://biodiversitylibrary.countersoft.net/issue/ViewIssue.aspx?id=31808&projid=7
SIL lists donors/previous owners in 700s - do other BHL libraries do this? NYBG uses 510s as searchable field, AMNH & MCZ use 700s too but haphazard
Should this info be stripped from BHL? Right now BHL takes 700s and associates it with author information
Yes, it's useful to keep donor information in the record
BHL can ingest multiple authors that are duplicates but you cannot edit on the backend Admin Dash records with duplicated authors - this is a problem, a roadblock for BHL Staff
Can we eliminate this "error" validation so that we can make changes to records?
WU: may be able to eliminate error message but this could affect a backend table, need to talk to Tech Team to estimate time/priority of making changes. He will report back to group
3 Goals of discussions to come:
  1. Jackie needs to be able to do her work and get back to users -- for now, JC can direct users to the more complete records available via the Contributing Library's catalog
  2. Problem that records cannot be edited on the backend b/c of duplicated authors
  3. author duplicates in general (longer term issue)
Ultimately need to decide how we want to better bring in this donor/previous owner vs. author data and display it in BHL
Do we know how many records are affected by this? -
WUlate
WUlate
WUlate : UPDATE: Yes, there is a total of 1561 title records with duplicated authors, distributed like this: 1 title record with an author duplicated 6 times, 2 title records with the author duplicated 6 times, 5 title records with an author duplicated 3 times and 1553 title records with an author duplicated 2 times. Caveat: This list is not taking into consideration that the same person might have another role (illustrator, editor, etc.) in the 700 e$ field but was ingested as an author (to be solved). But also, it is not considering authors duplicated per se in the database, ie. what looks (reads) like duplicated authors but have different IDs in the database are being currently considered as different for this query.
It's been this way since the beginning so we should take the time to consider how best to resolve the issue going forward
Very important that records are accurate

Oct 21

Attendees: Bianca, Don, Trish, William, Diana, Connie, Joe, Matt
Agenda/Notes:



Proposed ARW titles
  1. Letters and reminiscences: http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/27222#/summary
  2. Studies scientific & social http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/29854#/summary
  3. My life: a record of events and opinions http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/45463#/summary -- used for the Book of the Week blog post for 11/7
  4. A narrative of travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/28957#/summary
  5. Natural selection and tropical nature http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/19780#/summary
  6. Contributions to the theory of natural selection http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/1254#/summary
  7. Darwinism: an exposition of the theory of natural selection http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/20219#/summary
  8. Linnean society http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/1277#/summary
  9. The geographical distribution of animals http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/42326#/summary
  10. Island life http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/7552#/summary
  11. The Malay archipelago http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/45224#/summary -- used for a previous Book of the Week post
  12. Malaysia and the Pacific archipelagoes http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/25346#/summary
  13. Notes of a botanist on the Amazon & Andes http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/17908#/summary
  14. Tropical nature and other essays http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/1261#/summary
  15. The world of life http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/28125#/summary
  16. Palm trees of the Amazon and their uses http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/11168#/summary
  17. Travels on the Amazon http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/58207#/summary
  18. The wonderful century, its successes and failures http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/20113#/summary

Oct 7 call canceled

Sept 23 call used to discuss incorporation of user-generated article content into BHL w/ sub-group of Collections Committee, to report on 10/7 call

Sept 9 email discussion re: Collections Committee charge, see FINAL language on our Main page

Aug 26



Attendees: Bianca, Becky, Trish, William, Marty, Gilbert, Matt, Joe, JJ
Notes
Bianca set up a new collection for NHM just recently and wanted to share that this is the best way for folks to get the most up-to-date numbers regarding your institution's contributions to BHL for titles, volumes/items, and pages.
You can also access your institutional contribution stats via the BHL Administrative Dashboard by going to Library Stats > Expanded Library Stats and selecting your institution from the drop down list; leave the "show statistics by month" box unchecked to see your totals for titles, volumes/items, pages and even names (which you cannot get from the public UI).
Keep in mind Admin Dash numbers are updated on a weekly basis so are not as up-to-date as the stats available via the public UI
If anyone would like a collection set up for them, please let Bianca know
Please note that this collection will automatically update as new content is scanned

BHL will run a social media campaign complete with an iTunes U collection about Alfred Russel Wallace on the anniversary of his death in November
Bianca will be asking the Committee to help chose items for this collection - please stay tuned
Goal for BHL Outreach activities to aim for 4 iTunes U collections a year - We need ideas for a Spring 2014 collection - Bianca will be working on this collection just before and when she returns from maternity leave

Regarding portal editing for non-BHL member ingested content from the Internet Archive - Decisions:

Bianca to post this information about deaccessioning ingested content and redirecting titles/items on our Deaccession Policy

No further thoughts/comments about the 3rd party links position paper
Bianca and Martin will be reviewing the paper with comments next week
WU reports that EC will be discussing the paper during their 9/5 meeting

July 29 & Aug 12 discussions via email

July 15

Agenda
French Savants.xlsx
French Savants.xlsx
French Savants.xlsx



Notes
Attendees: Robin, JJ, Joe, Connie, Diana, Don, Matt, William, Trish, Bianca

Folks agree that a Monday morning reminder for the Collections call is sufficient

JJ to add Egypt plates volume for Napoleon campaign collection main title

Continuing our discussion from last time re: externally hosted content
Do we have to add 3rd party links?
We do have a commitment to Global Names Architecture (GNA) project but WU would like to hear our concerns and suggestions for how to implement
Chris Freeland is still the PI on this grant - What is GNA expecting of BHL?
1. Citations in BHL (w/out content!)
2. Link outs to third party websites = externally hosted content

EC thinks that the more we can include in the BHL the better but what does this mean for user experience / user expectations?
Tech Team to get functionality going in beta.biodiversitylibrary.org to allow folks to see/experience what externally hosted content would be like
Clear that article access is a great improvement for BHL
Folks on the call feel that users generally seem to want a 1-stop-shop for their resource needs
Remember users tend to Google their way into BHL anyway
Quality is an issue to consider
BHL as curator of content vs. aggregator of biodiversity content ==> what are we? for now, more of a curator of content ==> should we be just one or both?
Concerns about searchability and user expectations - third party links would require a change in the way we present BHL
Could we have filters so that you have the option to see the difference between locally hosted, ie content IN the BHL repository, vs. externally hosted, content available on a third party website
WU: Yes, we can implement a filter but the question is whether the default for this filter should be on or off?
Technically there are ways to achieve this
BC: What about curating BHL content w/ all these new citations? ==> would we need to deduplicate against these citations?
WU: Mike is working on algorithms to dedupe, results based on a % looks the same; this would become a part of the ingest process; Mike has done tests of the algorithm using Rod Page's articles metadata that we already have in BHL by comparing each one of them individually with the rest of the group of Rod's articles in BHL. The preliminary results show that for each article there is a 100% match (itself) and then some results in a higher range (maybe above 90% similar) that are probably the same article and need to be clustered together. But also other results in a little lower range (above 50% similar) that are not the same article, but they are articles related to the one being searched or at least share a great deal of the other's title. This could allow us interesting possibilities for the future, like the potential to provide suggestions of the type: "Were you looking for these other content?" or "You might also be interested in:". For illustration, check the following 5 examples:

SCORE
SEGMENT

SEGMENT TITLE
1.0000000
2

The genus Tetragnatha (Araneae, Argiopidae) in Jamaica, B.W.I., and other neighboring islands 1957 Chickering, A M
0.5347065
25700

The genus Tetragnatha (Araneae, Argiopidae) in Jamaica, W.I 1962 Chickering, A M
0.5014161
14048

The genus Tetragnatha (Araneae, Argiopidae) in Panama 1957 Chickering, A M
0.5014161
14049

The genus Tetragnatha (Araneae, Argiopidae) in Panama 1957 Chickering, A M

SCORE
SEGMENT

SEGMENT TITLE
1.000000
26

Contribution to a revision of the earthworm family Lumbricidae. II. Indian species 1958 Gates, G E
0.500517
15

Contributions to a revision of the earthworm family Lumbricidae. I. Allolobophora limicola 1957 Gates, G E


SCORE
SEGMENT

SEGMENT TITLE
1.0000000
43

Some new species of dacetine ants 1959 Brown, W L
0.6204642
42

A revision of the dacetine ant genus Neostruma 1959 Brown, W L
0.5314071
82176

The Dacetine ant genus Mesostruma Brown 1952 W L , Jr Brown


SCORE
SEGMENT

SEGMENT TITLE
1.0000000
56

Umbellula Cuvier,[1797] (Cnidaria, Anthozoa): proposed conservation as the correct original spelling, and corrections to the entries relating to Umbellularia Lamarck, 1801 on the Official Lists and Indexes of Names in Zoology 1997 Bayer, F M Grasshoff, M
0.9177635
104

On the proposed conservation of Umbellula Cuvier,[1797] (Cnidaria, Anthozoa) as the correct original spelling, and corrections to the entries relating to Umbellularia Lamarck, 1801 on the Official Lists and Indexes of Names in Zoology 1997 Cornelius, P F S



SCORE
SEGMENT

SEGMENT TITLE
1.0000000
63

On the proposed conservation of the specific name of Parapronoe crustulum Claus, 1879 (Crustacea, Amphipoda) 1997 Zeidler, W Holthuis, L B
0.7663364
14148

Parapronoe Crustulum Claus, 1879 (Crustacea, Amphipoda): Proposed Conservation Of The Specific Name 1996 Zeidler, Wolfgang


Who would review the deduped results to make determinations of ingest or not to ingest?
Have we applied the algorithm to current BHL content? WU: Mike has only run it on articles to test the results, but running it in all BHL is an excellent suggestion, although it might take a lot of time running them on the BHL corpus. But Mike has implemented the algorithm in a way that can be used in several cases where comparisons to dedup are needed.
Benefits: If the goal is to present as much biodiversity content as possible then externally hosted content really delivers; BHL could grow to be the most comprehensive resource for biodiversity literature
But would it then cease to be the most trusted?
TRS: Externally hosted content to be a small % of content (for now); we would only be working with organizations that we trust
MP: We may need a stronger visual cue that you are going to an external site; current display makes the citation to externally hosted content look seamless alongside other BHL content - users need to know they're going some place different
WU wants to hear our concerns & suggestions on how to implement; Benefits: providers happy to get referrals from BHL, we can begin to get a better idea of how much biodiversity content is out there
DW: 2nd that a better visual cue needed, also link to externally hosted content opens in the same window - wouldn't it be better to have this open in a separate window so that you don't get separated from the BHL website?
Do we have numbers on people accessing our taxonomic bibliographies? We'll need to make it clear with users that they'll only be getting names in these bibliographies for content IN the BHL, not names for content on external sites - or maybe there's a way we can index scientific names if they appear as subject headings for externally hosted content?
WU: external content means we do not have access to the page level information
For ex.: Rio Jardin Botanico Madrid (RJB) using UBio to find names in their content but BHL can only link to their whole content file, BHL cannot link at the page level so we cannot surface these scientific names within BHL services
BC: Should we survey our users?
What about other digital libraries?
What about placeholder citations? = "stub issue" and NOT equivalent to externally hosted content
Considering implementing this on the backend but not displaying for our users
Is EC supposed to make the final decision about how we proceed? -
lipscombb
lipscombb
lipscombb Jul 18, 2013 Yes, I confirmed with Martin that EC should be making the final decision
DW: How did we get involved with GNA in the 1st place?

July 1

Agenda


Notes
Attendees: Diana, Gilbert, Bianca, Don, Connie, Marty, Matthew, William, JJ, Joe

We host the scan vs. we link out to a scan on a third-party website - "hosted externally"
users don't care about where it is as long as they can get to it
will there be titles that won't link out to anything?
yes, we will index content that won't link out, keep as place holders, desiderata list, as we acquire content/links we will show them in the UI
we won't show these citations w/out content in our UI
some items in BHL will content in our repository or we will have items w/ links to third party content
not sure it is worth holding these citations on our backend? how can BHL Staff make use of this desiderata list?
WU to write something up and send out to group
do we have any citations in CB that don't link out?
Some of the journals coming from ZooBank...??? IPNI...??? Plazi...??? But it sounds like these are all original descriptions/treatments
Our understanding is that users would not want to come across citations in BHL that don't link to content
almost all the content in CB does provide content
but for a period of time, but we do have about 300 or so citations that don't link anywhere

DW: why are we linking out to third-party content?
TRS: differences b/w CB & BHL - trying to marry both; it's simpler to point out to content - we may want to rethink this but this would require more work on our end, some publishers may not want us to host their content, can't take advantage of our value added tools
discussion has been diffuse or not
could we actually harvest the text to do an FT search?
what kind of sites are we talking about? Pensoft, OTS organization of tropical studies, RJB Madrid,
collections they've aggregated or published
Permissions titles recent have e-journal only content
questions have been raised and need to be addressed more appropriately ==> requires further discussion
are we committed to providing link outs to third party content? under Global Names Architecture we are but it would be good to review the concerns.
when we talk about integrating CB into GNA - third-party links are a part of this
users may be confused about what to expect from the BHL with these changes
Titles vs. Items confusion...
we need to be clear with our users about what we have in the BHL - are we going to flag content that we link out to
we shouldn't be working with publishers concerned with retaining their brand
it's a common repository function to index various other sites and linking out
who we are is about the tools that we provide - linking out to 3rd party content is a dillution of this process
need to make it clear to users that they're leaving our site
need to make it clear to users that they're search for scientific names will not pick up on third-party content, e.g. name bibliography tool will only work on content in BHL, not on 3rd party content
do we want carefully curated content that we control and host or do we want to be a comprehensive repository of biodiversity content?
BHL has a reputation for providing the services that we do
what is the total number of citations that we're moving in? TRS can send folks a CiteBank stats document and to provide CB collection overview
talk amongst ourselves and outline concerns then take concerns to BHL Staff
we need to be clear about what we're discussing
could we also use the criteria to measure against content that we have in our own collections?

June 3

Agenda

Notes
Attendees: Robin, Matt, Diana, Gilbert, Marty, Trish, William, Connie, Bianca
Internal Collection Development Policy:
Yes, include goal #1 big and bold at top
Comments for google doc had to be general, couldn't highlight a section and leave a comment
Keep mention of CiteBank until platform is no longer available
MS: Can we upload articles to BHL? Cornell has article info for some content scanned; TRS: We migt be able to talk to Mike L. about this; Francis Webb heard from Mike that it's not possible at this point but could be a potential for the future.
Currently 2 ways to add article metadata to BHL 1) via Biostor.org 2) Manually via the BHL Admin Dash > Segments option under Library Functions > select "Add new segment"
A few BHL Staff working on getting segment creation documentation to send out when ready
Re: copyright issues & take-down procedures, be sure to mention that we are not responsible for non-BHL member scans ingested from IA, also that the onus needs to be on the copyright holder to present a infringement claim for take-down
Bianca participating in SIL Due Diligence committee that will be issuing a protocol with some take-down language that BHL may be able to adopt
Bianca to make sure to use the wiki "include page" function so that editing a section on our internal wiki also auto updates that section on the public wiki
See the updated Collection Development Policy page

In other news:
Yay! Cornell has successfully added 7 items to the BHL, such as Hubner's papilio http://biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/65296#/summary
32 more items to come in the next few weeks
MS to send GB info to incorporate Cornell images into flickr
Already a few seed & nursery catalogs in BHL ==> good to create a collection of these materials
NYBG to digitize seed catalogs soon as part of an NEH grant
Is there a way to tag items at digitization or prior to sending to IA in order to automatically add the items to an existing seed catalog collection in BHL?
William and Trish to check with Mike L. about this
NYBG NEH grant is to catalog and digitize, for Cornell materials some have good records but others minimally cataloged into "crude groups"

Apr 22

Agenda
Had a fantastic time in South Africa for the BHL-Africa launch and looking forward to sharing more about that. Please see this wiki page for the collection management presentation I gave : Connie also gave a great presentation on copyright issues and BHL -- no small task!

I need to present on collections topics at the IC Meeting coming up in 2 weeks. I would like to cover the following Collections Committee topics:
  1. Digitization Project Nomination Form Digitization+Project+Nomination+Form
  2. Collection Analysis collection+analysis
  3. Internal collection development policy: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pd-_cTTsZ-6FCHqvxBh0LtKajHWKJjh0Th6ybWanDH4/edit
  4. Microfiche decisions: Collection+Quality
  5. some tidbits from BHL Africa presentation might be helpful, like the "collection management" cycle for ex. (see presentation linked above)

Notes
Attendees: Becky, Marty, Diana S., Matt, Connie, William, Bianca

BHL Africa
Not sure if they can supply content to BHL, South Africa seems to be able to
Lots of PDF content
WM: University of Pretoria (UP) plans to upload content to <biodiversity> collection in IA so should show up in our portal
BHLA may want to create a collection of BHLA content - collection of content from BHLA institutions & yes, you can search within this collection
question of other libraries...
try to set up a Macaw and upload to IA at UP to try and do this with Kenya colleagues
collection impacting performance
MS question: is Macaw a local installation at UP? there is not yet a web version available?
WM: version downloaded from github and installed at UP
web version for BHL US/UK supposed to be available in July
web version already available at MOBOT
UP has a very very good connection
MS: How do they feel about African content already scanned?
CR: They were happy
People haven't spent too much time with BHL
they have a LOT of grey lit that is going to be very important
Copyright for BHLA very complex, SA more generous than US maybe scan up to 1940s-50s
There is an African copyright group that's trying to regulate
Ea. institution has their own way of dealing with copyright issues
dissertations and grey lit, institutionally produced may have their own copyright policies
encouraged everyone to figure out copyright laws within own countries/institutions; experts on their own countries
explained that we will take down content but not necessarily protection but a good faith effort
WM: BHLA definitely going to put content in IA; Ria (at UP) wants to push content into IA ASAP
Sounds like they really want to have content in our portal
MS: thinks it's great to have all the content in one place to search across all and search within BHLA collection
might do a static BHLA homepage to express what their, making their homepage like darwin's library page

IC Meeting
Ideas for main themes to present to IC look good
Connie to help Bianca with internal collection development policy outline
MS: How is the internal policy different from the public one
BC: the internal policy spells out a lot of our collections committee discussions from the past, like details about not ingesting google content, how we do not do "frankenbooks" and how we handle microfiche for ex.
MP: Good to tell IC that Collections committee has been meeting for a long time and in a continuing fashion; a lot of history
BM: also that we're transparent and anyone can join our calls at any time (Yes!)
MS: Would be good to present collection stats change since last IC meeting
Bianca to send out DRAFT outline of IC discussion points by Mon 4/29

Becky would like to know more about how to answer to folks who ask about how they can participate in BHL, both from a membership and collections point of view
Need a better way to respond, Becky getting this question more and more but others have not
Likely Becky getting these questions as a result of field books work
E.g. A researcher providing content after embargo period
BM: We never want to make people feel like we don't want their content
All: Agreed! WM: it's also a matter of legality re: copyright issues BC: it's also an issue of technical feasibility, we're still waiting even for a way to incorporate our own US/UK content into BHL w/out the help if IA let along incorporating user-scanned content
Becky just wants a good party line...would be good to get this from IC membership group as well as how to talk about this from a collections perspective...

Apr 8

  1. Came across female illustrator, Mary Eaton, who did fantastic illustrations for Addisonia http://biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/5044 and The Cactaceae http://biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/46288 Problem, she is not in OCLC, therefore she is not in BHL. Is it possible to add her somehow or should we? On a related note, some female authors are listed as Mrs. so-and-so, making it difficult to find them in BHL. Can this be remedied? Example: Loudon, Mrs. (Jane), 1807-1858
  2. Collections recommendations for BHL - Africa: What do you think is one of the most important aspects of BHL collection development?
    1. on a related note, I have been brainstorming about what I think should be included in an INTERNAL BHL Collection Development policy see https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pd-_cTTsZ-6FCHqvxBh0LtKajHWKJjh0Th6ybWanDH4/edit?usp=sharing
    2. Remember we have a PUBLIC collection development policy (needs some updates)

  1. Collections update for the BHL IC meeting

Notes
Attendees: Matt, Joe, Gilbert, Diana, Don, William, Trish, Robin, Connie, Becky
New visual Collections Committee homepage looks good, maybe add a section for parking lot / trash items
Adding authors
Mary Eaton not in OCLC, no credit to her in our collection
DW can upload local authority to OCLC for us
Currently no way to find Mary Eaton in BHL
On the BHL side, it's technically very easy for us to add a new author to a record but not everyone who does portal editing has cataloging expertise
Ideally we should update OCLC with the name authority record & fix locally in BHL
Nice to get a new name on record & get the authority
Providing to OCLC means having a justification for adding the record, something that you couldn't get in BHL
Super common issue that illustrators may not have an authority record on file or even associated with the title as an added author
Are we saying that if we add an author to a record in BHL that we need to add the author to OCLC?
Diana found that Eaton, Mary E. has an authority record actually -- thanks!
put in as an added entry...
Who is a NACO (Name Authority Cooperative Program) contributor? Cal Acad is, Smithsonian Libraries is too (thanks Robin!)
BHL as a discovery tool is not reconciling w/ name authority so why wait until there is an authority record present?
Getting the correct form of the name would be KEY for BHL Staff performing portal edits who lack cataloging expertise
All communications could go through Gemini
Becky to talk to her PT cataloger Stella about whether or not she could help BHL in this way
BHL Africa
A group of BHLers are going to South Africa as part of the BHL-Africa launch
Anne-Lise is the interim director of BHL-Africa until there are elections
Previous meetings discussed governance and signing of MOUs
Now the question is about how BHL-Africa will collaborate as a big group
What kinds of things do they need to define?
Documents can be shared with them a week in advance, esp. our collection development policy
How basic is this meeting going to be?
It is recommended that they take everything from us, just jump in and do it. Best not to recreate their own portal or re-invent the wheel in other ways
William reports that BHL-Africa is really into sharing & reusing, they are going to contribute to IA
Are BHL Africa materials cataloged in MARC?
Those that signed MOUs are receiving a questionnaire
Our best practice: We need MARC records, we'll make exceptions but this has serious downsides
Yes, it's accurate that BHL US/UK is marked by autonomy & trust
Becky "loves requirements" -- sounds like BHL-Africa is looking for this; we should provide our "requirements" that provide the best display/functionality in BHL
Our collection development policy states that we actively collect X, Y, Z but this doesn't mean that you won't have exceptions
Strict recommendations may go to far; Talk about how we do what we do and why
William: BHL-Africa wants to hear our success stories and best practices
Copyright will be an interesting topic and Connie is presenting on this to the BHLA group

Mar 25 CANCELED

Mar 11 CANCELED

Feb 25

Notes
Attending: Don, Matt, Joe, Becky, Trish, Gilbert, Judy, Marty, Robin

Reviewed list of Notable women in natural history collection items
Becky suggested using the Popular flora of Denver for Eastwood instead of the book picked; Handbook of Nature Studies also good

iBooks vs. iTunes U
iBook = an electronic book that we create from BHL content for use via an e-reading device.
Gilbert is experimenting w/ creating a Shark Week iBook using images, quizzes, slideshows; another way to repackage BHL content
Anything that's online can become a part of the iBook; creating free books based on BHL content

Also the Biodiversity Library Exhibition tool http://www.biodiversityexhibition.com/ , developed by BHL-Europe colleagues
Allows us to create virtual exhibitions of curated BHL content
Gilbert getting training on how to work with the tool
Looking into doing a Poisonous Plants collection, Extinct Species collection is next
What about doing a Women's Collection?
May be a good option for Connecting Content materials as well
Anybody can use the tool to curate collections, you just need a login

Women's Collection: Don suggested somehow adding Wikipedia links so that users can understand more about who these women are since BHL lacks the biographical information
Question of where to insert the links into BHL
It would be great to link to the biographical information when a user gets to the author's name
[ X ] Bianca to ask Mike L. about this functionality - at one point she thought there was a place in BHL for this biographical info (leftover from Botanicus functionality)
Update: Mike L. confirmed that there was this functionality in the past but it has been removed
Robin suggests adding Gertrude Jekyll and will send Bianca the info
Other suggestions: Almira Hout Lincoln Phelps
[ X ] Bianca to finalize Women's collection to post to the BHL http://biodiversitylibrary.org/browse/collection/NHwomen and a smaller selection for itunes U

Nominating new priority titles:
Don: How can we go about nominating new titles as priority issues in Gemini?
Bianca: Back in October/November our Collections group talked about recommendations for how to prioritize content for the new 10K scanning allocation and we decided that money should be used for Botany & Zoology priority titles . Going forward, what's the best way to nominate new titles as priorities given limited funding and a first come, first serve scanning methodology? Want to be as fair as possible.
Judy: As long as literature is taxonomic
Materials that are rare are also good priority candidates; also requests from staff at our home institutions make sense to prioritize
Robin has been submitting requests to the BHL Gemini system
Judy recommends anything on SE Asian Botany
Judy: if a request comes in that you know is a priority, send it for scanning
Decision: Leave prioritization up to BHL staff, if you get a request that you think is a priority title, send it for scanning.
Bianca concerned about the backlog of scanning requests, there are over 200!
Don & Robin have volunteered to help cut the backlog down.


Feb 4

Agenda:

Notes
Attending: Bianca, Diana, Don, Gilbert, Joe, Judy, Trish

Agenda items:
1. Bianca opened the meeting by stating her intention to organize the Collection Committee section of the Wiki to make it easier to use. She asked for a volunteer to help with notes and Judy complied. -
lipscombb
lipscombb
lipscombb Feb 6, 2013 THANK YOU JUDY!

Announcement: AMNH has now joined BHL at the Steering Committee level – Congratulations!

2. NAL Scanning to IA
Although the current relationship between NAL and BHL is unclear, NAL now has 1 or 2 IA Scribes in-house. Bianca was asked to determine if BHL should ingest all or only selected NAL items. She reported that there are currently about 1,600 items and based on her cursory review, Bianca recommends that we follow the usual ingest criteria to eliminate out-of-scope materials (e.g. farm equipment, agricultural policies, etc.). The general discussion resulted in the following recommendations.

Action items:

3. Next iTunes U Collection = Women's History Month – Deadline is Feb. 22
Gilbert and Grace are organizing quarterly releases for iTunes U collection. They have chosen to recognize contributions made by women to natural history as represented in BHL. Gilbert distributed a list of names and links identified so far and asked for recommendations. They don’t want to omit any “obvious” choices prior to the Feb. 22 deadline. He also needs recommendations for content that would provide good images to the BHL Flickr photostream. Gilbert looking to good "paper book" references for recommendations. Some good names to have: Alice Eastwood, Mary North, Elizabeth Agassiz, Mary Rathbun (Rathbun noticed b/c Biostor indexing articles in BHL by her; at this time we cannot add article content to collections

Action item:

4. Microfiche update
Bianca summarized the CC’s recommendation to ingest microform content if it was the only available copy of an appropriate item, but to ask Mike to make them less prominent in search results by giving them less “weight.” Trish reported that Mike searched for microfilm/fiche terms and found 2,152 items. Since they seemed to all come from Canadiana.org he then search for all hits from that source. The result was 2,226 items. His solution was to rank the Canadiana.org titles lower in the search results and it seems to be working. One caveat was mentioned – the function is not active during the daily maintenance run each night at midnight (CST?). Everyone agreed that this seemed like a good solution. Test search "Canada fish" to see how the new weighting is working.

Action item:

5. Collections Analysis update
Bianca called attention to the collection analysis page with information recommended and/or compiled by the group ( collection+analysis ) She reminded Joe that she will be contacting him to work on the keyword search list. She asked how we might move forward the various bibliographies that have been recommended as key to various natural history fields. Don and Judy agreed that running an author/title list from TL-2 against BHL would be very useful in prioritizing out-of-copying materials. Bianca will ask Joel Richard at SI if this is possible. New York, Missouri and Harvard Botany have made use of a citation report generated by Kew of IPNI citations. Getting a title list from BPH might be problematic and difficult to use since serials are so bibliographically challenging. The status of the Smithsonian’s project to database Index Animalium was also raised so Bianca will check with Suzanne Pilsk for an update. Question about what is the priority of doing this bibliographic work? As with other analysis strategies this would take a team of volunteers & time. David Frodin compiled bibliography of world floras. Botany priority titles looked at IPNI, not TL2, and prioritized based on number of citations. Did we still want to get ILL data for collection analysis? Would likely show data about who's doing what rare project when and not super useful for us. Net lenders vs. net borrowers. ILL data going to be more current ==> good for getting post 1923 recommendations. George Staples recommended we reach out to Singapore Bot. Soc. to get permission.

Action items:

Next call on Monday Feb 25 (2/18 is a holiday)


2012 Notes

Dec 10

Attendees: Joe, Matt P., Marty, Gilbert, Connie, Diana, Robin, Becky
Agenda

Notes
Joe remembers that OCLC analysis tool was not useful, but Connie would know more
Done in 2008
Compared original 10 BHL member libraries to each other
Diana: so many multiple records in OCLC, use of series call nos. for item analytics
Connie and Dough Holland wrote a paper about this: collectionsstatusfinal.doc
See also OCLCAnalysisConcerns
OCLC didn't have a fine enough grain to do effective analysis
Hard to compare b/c of call no. inconsistencies

EU museums in an age of migrations
MELA - cultural heritage meeting
Jane & Connie gave synopsis of BHL to folks in Glasgow - meeting on immigrants
talk well received, really interested in artwork
Alexander Vadenoff - cool exhibits tool, could be good for a connecting content project
Focus different but really attracted
someone want to do data analysis
meeting wasn't focused on normal BHL topics
really connected w/ ppl that we wouldn't have connected with otherwise

Top 500 keywords:
would have to look at all botanical and zoological terms
zoology & botany refer to general terms vs. specificity rule in cataloging, periodicals tend to use (generic terms?)
Entomology collection analysis came across UF b/c of BHL records
Could tell us more but getting post coordinated subject headings is problem
general - specific subject heading list
could be organized hierarchically to do analysis
work with topical ones anything online
classification web, MCZ, SIL have
Joe and Bianca to look more closely at keyword list

Scan request data:
lots of foreign language titles, users aren't limited to English
good source of permissions possibilities
title author matches to OCLC numbers & headings

Top 1000 items for PDFs
ttl items in title -- compared to items used
item count = most volumes
most PDFs = most articles
break down by class ranges might reflect nature of user community
call no. analysis?
class web - enter 1 by 1 or automated?
QK495 there were cataloging changes
use most specific call no. but libraries want periodicals together
institution by institution
geographic call nos.
a lot of journals requested in print or ILL
talk to Robin & Diana further re: call no. analysis

Nov 26

Attendees: Trish, Joe, Don, Diana, Gilbert, Matt, Marty, Bianca
To Discuss:

Notes:
Discussion centered around issue of microfiche in BHL and what to do about it, if anything
Bianca analyzed a set of microfiche contributed to BHL via ingest from Canadiana.org
Spreadsheet details:
So what should we do about this, if anything?
Yes, microfiche quality is poort but it is good to keep in spite of poor quality if it is the ONLY copy, it's better than no access at all
Ideally, we should remove microfiche if an equivalent good quality copy already exists in BHL
Ideally, we should make a deliberate effort to rescan poor quality items if available in a BHL member library
We need to keep the unique microfiche copies
DW: This work should be a low priority -- JdV & BC agree
Focus should be on other areas of collection analysis
MS: not good to use Canadiana list as collection development tool, their criteria should not influence our criteria
This is more of a QA driven collection development tool than a content driven one
JdV: Have users complained about this?
BC: Not a one through Gemini has complained anyway; only librarians have voiced concerns; I'm not a fan of these personally
there seems to be a series statement "Series: CIHM/ICMH microfiche series" in all the Canadiana records -- appears in search results and on bibliographic title record display = "View record" display
Maybe there could be a better way of marking these anomalies in our collection to users?
(Yes, 500 is the max search results limit)
Could we weight search results to rank microfiche below other BHL member contributed titles?
BHL member content is of better quality and should sort at the top of a search results list
Can we safely determine all the microform content in the BHL collection?
Majority of it seems to be from Canadiana.org. It is possible that microform is coming in from other contributors but it is few and far between.
Should we weight BHL member contributed content over non-BHL member contributed content?
Some say yes, if possible but others make the good point that our users don't care about the distinction and depending on the user's search, weighting results in this way might eliminate the user's most relevant hit from the top of the list
For the most part, non-BHL member ingested content is of the same quality as BHL member content; microfiche from Canadiana has been only example so far where it's not
Weight only microform below other search results then
Action Item: Trish to ask Mike if we can weight the search results to have microfiche (or Canadiana.org) content occur at the bottom of the list

Decisions:

Sept 24

To Discuss:

Sept 10

Attendees: Don, Gilbert, Connie, Diana, Joe, Marty, BiancaNo call last week due to Labor Day holiday
BHL Execs want to see us go forward with Digitization Project Nomination Form, Bianca to:
Chris from Kew or Judy might have some good fodder for filling out these forms
DW has some vague ideas that might take shape around a small mycology collection
Yes, the purpose of the form is so that Ideas can be presented to external funders
Group of institutions working on Digitization of Seed & Nursery Catalogs idea, still in "embryonic form" -- could be perfect for this form
Institutions involved are: NYBG, SI, Cornell, NAL, Anderson
At one point NYBG wrote a grant to scan see catalogs and could repurpose language

Collection analysis
Bianca sent out spreadsheet with pilot data, i.e. keywords for all titles with natural history as a subject heading, to group this AM and a follow up email with ~top 50 keywords just before the call
NaturalHistoryTitles-KeywordAnalysis.xlsx
Stats: 9584 rows = keywords, approx. 2255 titles (as of 8/30), keep in mind titles are duplicated; 3991 keywords for BHL member titles, approx. 987 BHL member titles
So does the pilot set answer the questions we were asking as part of our collection analysis? Yes, it seems to do so...
...but then how do we scale this to doing analysis on the entire BHL collection?!
DW: Maybe breakdown titles into smaller groups based on discipline - Botany vs. Zoology and breakdown from there (Ento, Fungi, Mammals, etc.)
separate tables by disciplinary area
Botany institutions could take Botany titles and etc.
MS: What tools should we be using to do the analysis? What questions should we be asking of the data? Questions we're asking are here collection analysis
Only 3237 titles with "Botany" as a subject heading, only 1483 titles with "Zoology" as a subject heading ==> because more specific subject areas get more specific LCSH
Anyone among us familiar with LCSH -- Diana
DS: subject associations in the authority records
BC: what about FAST, would that help?
MS: Cornell has someone working on FAST; Cornell performed similar exercise to pull all entomology materials across campus together
Looked at LC classification and ran it against whole campus
Then cam up with a list of keywords, not just subject headings but title keywords as well
==> keywords + LC class range against catalog
MS to send out keyword list to group
Are there any ontologies or controlled vocabs out there that could help scale this process to other disciplines?
LCSH is useful but not the only way...
Cornell as go to for Entomology
other institutions focus on their subject areas
purpose of gap-fill is to do so within BHL member institutions so ignore ingest
We could ask each BHL member institution to pull together terms like Cornell did
others can decide if Cornell model works?
OK, but what about natural history pilot
DW uses bibliographies to build collections - major & minor bibliographies
bibliography approach is viable -- we've done this before with serials priority list
another example is old floras broken out by geography
subject librarians could help, maybe reaching out to folks not in BHL?
keep tying back to core supporting terms
2 things before next meeting:

Next meeting on 9/24

8/20

Discussion of Project Nomination Form

Discussion of questions for collection analysis

Q: Matt asked about MARC records and how they work in BHL
A: MARC records are associated with items in BHL. Thus to access a MARC record via the BHL administrative dashboard, you need to go to the "Items" option under the "Library Functions" menu OR go to the "Titles" option and scroll down until you see the list of items associated with the title.

8/6

Bianca, Don, Marty, Gilbert, Joe, Matt, William, Connie

Discussion of Project Nomination Form
Maybe would be good to have an internal detailed form for BHL Staff vs. an external form (maybe a blog post? maybe through kickstarter or indigogo) with more summarized information for potential funders, ie executive summaries
an "elevator speech"
Connie to bring this Q up to execs
Look at kickstarter www.kickstarter.com
yes, project nomination form serves for internal and external purposes
portfolio of potential projects
cohesive collection of items to fulfill someone's funding purpose
MP: step 1 is for us to come up with different projects
add executive summary & request for an illustration
typically grant funded projects are opportunistic, this form is a way to record potential projects, like a clearinghouse for potential projects
GB: have list of projects available for people when they select the donate button
vs. donating to general fund
MS: campaign for collections, Cornell U including library collections in this campaign, each library asked to come up with a wishlist, then a 1 page sheet to put in front of donors, but specifics only turned over when appropriate, development offices now taking on library fundraising
Can we form a BHL development office?
Questions
CR to add questions onto the wiki page
EVERYONE encouraged to add their questions to the wiki page for BHL Execs

Shark Week collection for iTunes U launching on August 12
To help fuel outreach efforts with other social media outlets
Would be good to try and track shark week success -- note numbers of followers, likes, etc. before & after
What about Sharks as Food book? Yes, it's OK b/c historical (1918) and a fun item for a popular culture outlet such as iTunes U; in a different context the book would likely not be appropriate but it's fun here
PS Sharks are not kosher b/c they do not have scales

7/23

Attendees: Bianca, Matthew, Joe, Diana, Marty, Becky, Judy, Connie, William

As requested by IC at March meeting at MCZ - IC wants the BHL Collections Committee to identify sets of materials, collections to seek funding for
Connie & Judy working on assembling existing BHL Collections Committee materials
Goal: Create a BHL Back-pocket list so that when someone from BHL is talking to a potential funder, they can easily pitch fundable BHL project ideas
Objectives:

1. Create BHL project template for folks to fill out as potential funding ideas
2. Analyze scanning requests to understand common themes if any
3. Analyze current BHL collection to get a picture of what's actually in the BHL collection and determine what scanning is still needed

BHL Project template
Harvard Bot keeps a list of fundable projects on hand such as for the Exsiccate (project) - needs cataloging - dried specimen material - multi-volume sets w/ pages of specimens; in most herbaria they've been chopped and separated
MCZ Webster example
CAS "fast and loose" similar to MCZ blurb
[ ]If you have any examples from your home institutions of project templates for potential funders, please send those to me by next Monday July 30

Would these project templates be for individual BHL members or between BHL members? Very open-ended, intended to help capture whatever potential funding fodder may be available - ideas welcome!
Templates can help in looking for themes, should be more possible post NEH grant to gather ideas around projects involving illustrations
Judy: It's about finding common hooks and going to funders on board
Could be collections and themes for partner projects - funding between various BHL members - whatever would enhance BHL but with a broader funding base then where we've been; partner complimentary materials;
Could also focus on geographic areas - what's missing, what needs to be done
Becky has encouraged potential funders to submit scanning requests
Harvard bot has summary of titles for Flora of India --> could go in a BHL project template!

Gemini scan requests Analysis
Is an analysis of Gemini issues really reasonable to do?
[ ]Bianca to get an output of scan request data and take a look
Assess scan requests by discipline or field or type of material -
Unfortunately scan requests do not easily parse data in a way that's easily analyzable, info from scan request is lumped into general comment field ==> need to just look over data - then how would you interpret results?
birds & orchids are fundable, baby animals

BHL Collections Analysis
We have this large gap in BHL & this is what it would cost to fill it
Connie & Bianca discussed potential reports that could be used for analysis:

1. All BHL content
2. BHL member contributed content
3. non-BHL member contributed content
Analyze these 3 groups by subject headings and call nos.

Does anyone use Dewey? Not BHL members, but some non-BHL members do; Branching into Dewey analysis might be a bit much...
[ ]Bianca to write up a proposal for what fields should be requested for these reports and share with the group for comment
Cornell had to take quite a few different approaches to get all their entomology content together 1) took all from ento library 2) took call no. ranges that related to ento and compared to larger cornell collection 3) keywords in records analysis, but had to watch out for keywords like "fly"
Important to have something to measure collection against that is more comprehensive than BHL
For Botany it would be TL2
Measured against SIL & MCZ collections for serials
Measure against disciplinary collections?
Measure against Index Animalium?

Action Items
[ ]Would be useful to get a spreadsheet version of the word cloud
short term goal: complete BHL project template
[ ]Send in institutional examples by 7/30 to Bianca or collections listserv
[ ]Bianca to have DRAFT BHL project template due 8/6
long term goal: collections analysis
[ ]Bianca to send out DRAFT of fields for requesting reports of Mike L. to group by 8/6 for comment
Would be good to have things to report to greater BHL staff by BHL staff meeting in October

6/18

Attendees: Bianca, Marty, Don, Joe, Trish, Matt, Gilbert, Trish, Robin, Becky

BHLE & gBHL updates

CiteBank updates - bringing bibliographies into CB
bibliographies - 2 types: 1) original descriptions/protologues 2) distribution of species, ecology, etc.
1) can be a bit tricky - do we bring into CB now? or wait until CB is incorporated into BHL and bring into BHL?
md needed: traditional citation information + binomial name(s) + "original description" publication type + rights
rights issues: users uploading single page or few pages or whole article -- if (c) violation then people can flag items as inappropriate
Michael Gates (AMNH) Hymenoptera bibliography as guinea pig
Not advertising this widely
How do original descriptions fit into the BHL? Yes, absolutely they do from a content perspective but definitely a data model issue
Pulling from existing indexes like ZooRecord?; We are working on TL2
[ ]Follow up w/ MK about status of ZooRecord
Store indexes in BHL or have indexes elsewhere point to content in BHL?
Yes, indexes exist elsewhere and not necessarily BHL's job to manage
But BHL is a good place to hold the protologues
What about rights metadata when users upload their own content
Again, rights metadata only necessary when we're storing content, NOT when we're pointing to content living elsewhere

4/9

Attendees: Connie, Becky, Trish, Joe, Bianca
Still no clear update on what BHL Execs want re: BHL Collections committee work
Review of (c) metadata process
Trish, Joe, & Becky have volunteered to help
[X]Bianca to get documentation together and go over review process w/ folks since she'll be seeing Becky and Trish in person real soon!

4/2


3/26

Attendees: Don, Diana, Matt, Gilbert, Becky, Connie, Marty, William
Agenda: 1) BHL Search language 2) Teddy Roosevelt collection for iTunes U

Teddy Roosevelt for iTunes U
19 items authored or coauthored by TR
left on SI sponsored safari 3/23 -- 4/23, should we coord. release w/ this?
AMNH remodeling TR rotunda but not ready until October
TR image for iTunes U collection pulled from one of the books
mostly monographs

Search language
use "natural history libraries"
keep EOL
separate out [Help] link (vs. old "tutorials" link) and leave as is
order of operations: 1) have brief description of BHL 2) simple search tips 3) advanced search tip 4) Help link
[X]are boolean operators case sensitive?
add periods to simple search tips
add that it's not a full text search
[X]remove "Search the BHL" & replace w/ description, if possible

Notes from follow up w/ Mike: AND and OR are the only 2 boolean operators, NOT does not work, No boolean ops not case sensitive

3/18

Attendees: Joe, Matt, Robin, Becky, Judy, Connie, Don, Trish, William, Marty, Diana
Agenda: 1) new BHL search 2) Dublin Penny journal 3) IC meeting collections group todos

No need to display subjects in search results
Yes, good to be able to search on subject terms as part of keyword search
No to bringing in Dublin Penny journal as part of JSTOR metadata ingest into CiteBank
search for "bee" w/ quotations, a good tip, we should communicate this to users
IC mtg results:
"principles for building collections"
for 1) potential partners 2) potential funders "elevator speech" collection based scanning funding pitches
document that lists what the needs are, articulates what we're missing
executive summary for SC
priorities for scanning by middle of April!!!
specific recommendations
collection analysis by end of April!!!
CR & JW to get back to us after talking to BHL Execs to clarify more about what's actually needed
timeline to have final by end of April!!!
BTW 88 titles where component = collections and priority = major

3/5

email discussion re: ingestion of Google content
Decision: Continue to NOT bring in Google content

2/27

Discussion w/ MCZ & SIL re duplication issues and rare scanning


2011

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2010

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