December 14 (Members)

December 14 Conference Call

Conference Call Line Information

Dialing information:

If dialing from the US: 1 877 820 7829
If dialing from UK: 0 800 358 8173
If dialing from Australia: 1 800 547 099
If dialing from Singapore: 800 616 3166
If dialing from Mexico: 01 800 228 8149
If dialing from France (Paris): 0 800 949 765
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Enter the passcode: 407326

Attending: AMNH, BHL AU (earlier), BHL MX, BHL SG (earlier), Field, Harvard/Bot, Harvard/MCZ, LC, NHM, NYBG, Kew, SIL, UIUC, Carolyn Sheffield, Martin Kalfatovic

Regrets: Gildas Illien, Barbara Ferry, Kevin Merriman, Doug Holland, Cornell, Toronto, NAL, USGS

AGENDA and NOTES

Secretariat Update
- Upcoming Meetings
  - BCoN Data integration and attribution workshop. 13-14 February 2018, Lawrence, KS (Carolyn)
  - Ohio Natural History Conference. 24 February 2017. Cleveland (Martin)
  - Second Annual Digital Data in Biodiversity Research Conference. 4-6 June 2018, UC Berkeley Campus (Martin)
- BHL Blog. Grace and Joel are moving forward with the blog move to WordPress; it will be new and shiny! Maybe as soon as late January.
- 2019 Annual Meeting. Martin will issue the call for hosting the 2019 meeting in early January.

Technical Update | Notes from All Calls Are Online
- Article Batch Loading. This is rolled out in production. Thanks to Mike for taking care of this and to staff, particularly Susan Lynch who worked on the specs.
- Prioritization. The BHL EC prioritized full text search followed by transcription ingest as the next to development priorities.
- Tech Gemini Requests. Carolyn will be doing secondary triage of Gemini tech requests (after Bianca). There will also be a "soft freeze" of the current site so that only broken things will get immediate attention. See the draft language from the tech notes that will help external users understand this process.
- Name Finding. BHL is experimenting with running the tools on the BHL cluster at SI. From Joel: To keep you in the loop, I've installed Dima's new Name Finding code on our BHL ElasticSearch server. It's currently processing against a nearly full set of OCR files for BHL. I do not know how long it will take, but it is expected to run without interruption.

Topics from the Chair and Members (Connie/Jane)
- CY 2018 Spending Plan Proposal. At the BHL EC F2F meeting, the EC approved the Program Director's BHL Dues Spending Plan. Martin will review the plan with the group and he and the EC will answer questions and seek any further input. An electronic vote will be called for finalization later in December. 2018 Spending Plan proposal
- Report on BHL F2F Meeting (London): Major topics:
  - Reciprocal Partnerships
  - Budget (see above)
  - Strategic Planning Process
  - Science and BHL (invited guests from NHM London science team)
- Discussion Groups at Annual Meeting: There will be an opportunity at the Annual Meeting for guided discussion (as per Connie's message earlier). We need discussion leaders and/or additional topics (there will be time for 5 topic areas)
- Annual Meeting Update
  - To help with planning, please let us know where you'll be staying + any dietary restrictions:
    2018 BHL Annual Meeting Attendee Info
  - Please follow up with Connie if you are able to lead a discussion group
- NDSR Wrap Up. Connie noted that the NDSR project is wrapping up with the residents' last day being 6 January 2018. Smithsonian will host an NDSR Capstone event on 4 January with guest speakers Robin Dale (IMLS), Connie Rinaldo (Harvard/MCZ), Scott Miller (Smithsonian), and Trevor Owens (LC), Leora Siegel (ChiBotGar) and a Resident to be named later.
Recent/Upcoming Conferences/Meetings (Connie/All)
- DCDC 2017: Delivering Collections/Communities (Manchester, UK). Nancy Gwinn gave the final keynote at the meeting in November. See the video here.
- CNI Fall 2017. Martin attended the fall 2017 CNI meeting. He presented on TDWG at the request of CNI and TDWG.
- Kew Science Away Day. David gave a presentation on BHL to the Kew science community
- Dumbarton Oaks. Smithsonian, Harvard/Bot, MBG, Oak Springs, Cornell, NYBG attended an invitational meeting at Dumbarton Oaks and sponsored by JSTOR Plants and Mellon to explore collaborations around Plants and Society.

New Grants Submitted/Received (Connie)
- Judy will be applying for an internal Harvard grant for botanical illustrations.