December 2, 2008 BHL Executive Committee Notes
On Dec 2, 2008, at 11:50 AM, Constance Rinaldo wrote:BHL Executive Committee Minutes December 2, 2008
Reference Managers: Connotea has been very slow; refworks harder to implement across network; endnote better; need to take up the issue of reference management as a way to work with community bibliographies. The people in the various institutions that work with these products will be asked by Chris on the next Technical/Workflow working group phone call
Tom has sent a high and low budget to Institutional Council; also to Jim Edwards. Will try for supplemental funding requests; Proposal needs to be in by Dec 15. Tom has not received much feedback. Tom wondered if he should call everyone individually to get thoughts on the budget cuts
Cathy's work with automated markup--a perfect opportunity for supplemental money. This kind of data-mining/natural language processing is the future. Tom will add a general supplemental about automated markup: Taxonlit and "articalization". What would make the material in BHL more useful? Can we attach abstracts to names? EOL needs to be able to record what is the original citation. One method is to scan the references in Nomenclature Zoologicus that would give the "first described" citations. Can we get the vetted names from Zoo Record and first descriptions? Chris is still not clear what we need to be doing differently. Graham noted that there is no clear understanding of what is achievable yet. Graham guesses that there are 1.5 mill species with just the original descriptions and no other pubs. Only about a tenth have lots of literature. Should we make a concentrated effort to find all first descriptions. Tom noted that we should also use bibliographies as a check and guide for selection. Species descriptions may be buried and not easily findable. There is a great interest in identifying new descriptions and pulling them into the species pages. Markup has the stumbling block of actually getting stuff marked up--it is still manual but must be automated. Headings in taxonomic literature are not often consistent. Chris says we can point the nomenclature to the page on which the original description exists--immediately we can locate the original. Botanicus can do it because of Tropicos. The information doesn't necessarily live in the literature--it should live in EOL (??). Graham suggested that Tom speak to Jim and get his perception on this reality on vetted material. This is on the agenda for Tom and Jim's meeting regarding supplemental funding. Cathy notes what constitutes a species page is the academic issue. Jim may be leaning towards a more minimalistic version.
Connie noted that Ernst Mayr Library will be starting to pull jp2s from MCZ publications to archive in Harvard DRS and make article level links.
Chris: Portal desiderata, select pages from a book being pulled into a pdf. That is near production. This is a tool that will let endusers get what they want. Cathy has 20 volunteers that could work on this. Yay! MCZ pubs may be a good test for this!
Architecture meeting--what is the agenda and when should it happen? February or fine in March. Chris and Cathy will be in DC next week. Chris will be working with LC on flip book application which seems really good.
Graham: Adrian working on document package for BHL Europe.
Tom reminded us about the interest from China in a BHL China. We have several Chinese contacts, but Keping Ma is probably the main one. We should try to gather all the contacts and copy all on discussions.
Tom will send out a revised budget based on meeting with Jim E. Can't cut portal development, applications and software development.
Institutional Council meeting is Friday March 20th. Architecture meeting may be on the 19th but not sure yet.
Next call Dec 16 at 11 AM EST, 10 AM CST, 4 PM GMT
Next call Dec 16 at 11 AM EST, 10 AM CST, 4 PM GMT
