Feb212013bhlstaffnotes

February 21, 2013 Staff Call Notes

Attending:

Diana Duncan
David Iggulden
Bianca Crowley
Grace Costantino
Matthew Bolin
Judy Warnement
John Mignault
Matthew Person
Diana Shih
Gilbert Borrego
Alison Harding
Becky Morin
Mike Blomberg
Gwen Henry
Chris Carden
Joe deVeer
Kevin Nolan
Marty Schlabach

Calendar Appointment

Bianca will send calendar appointments for these staff calls to individual emails, so you can decline or accept reminders if you want them, and you won't receive a weird appointment update as happened on this call. Currently calendar appointments go to BHL listserv.

Scanning workflow check in: do you feel comfortable with the new procedures going forward? (all)
see the Guide here: Workflow documents

Two training sessions already held for scanning workflow.

Any thoughts on process?

• Judy: The training sessions were extremely helpful, especially since we're just starting to scan.
• Bianca: Anyone made use of the spreadsheet?
  • Alison Harding and David Iggulden have used the form. They found it straight forward and had no problems, and both found sessions very useful.
• Bianca: There is also now a checklist on the first page of the guide that outlines step by step the tasks to perform for the workflow. Sounds like everything is fine at this point though.

No other comments or issues with priority assignments in Gemini. Use listserv to pose questions, or send emails

General Questions:

• Judy: Is there any update on what's going on in Europe with monograph and serials scanning? How do we know globally what others are doing?
• Bianca: Global coordination of scanning right now is not active. I'm not sure what the status of BHL-Europe is. My understanding is that they have reached a pause. I don't know the status of their website, but there is a beta site. They have not loaded all BHL-Europe partner content into that site either. Once that content is in that site, how do we get it into our site? Right now only practical answer is that we have no way to bring in BHL Europe content in our website. Not sure about their scanning going forward either. BHL-US/UK has been operating on recommendation that we scan items ourselves.
• Judy: Susan Fraser and I are going to Kew to give a BHL update, and perhaps we can get an update from BHL-Europe partners. (David will not be able to attend that Kew meeting).
• Bianca: Another suggestion: Someone in BHL might have this information, but not sure who. Not sure how information travels from EC to SC either. Does anyone on the call know how this information travels?
• Judy: We always have a report from William, but it's often quite technical, but we do have a call tomorrow and we can ask this question on the call.
• Question added to SC Agenda
• Matthew P.: BHL-Europe site is live but when you try to search for something, you can an error message.
• John: They are out of funding now. The project is officially over. They were making some arrangements for some degree of maintenance, but not sure about the status of that. But now everything on the website itself is giving a 404 error. Only the tutorial and exhibitions site works.
• Bianca: Alison, do you have any information on whether Chris Sleep from NHM is working on BHL-Europe?
• Alison: Last I heard Chris Sleep was still working on BHL-Europe, but haven't heard anything since first quarter of last year.
• Bianca: Is there still a BHL-Europe contact? Henning has moved on. We should ask William if there is a contact.
• Question added to SC Agenda

Status of new UI (John, Joe)**

• John: Status is that it looks like we will go live in early March (as of this morning). Beta testing yielded 100 various observations. some were related to design issues, which we didn't want to receive, but there were also errors and functionality problems identified. These were prioritized and Mike L. and BHL-Au working on fixing those. Grace and Bianca working on user instructional materials for the launch.
• Bianca: Should Grace and I be disseminating the materials?
• John: Hold off until more definitive word from William.
• Marty: If we didn't participate in beta testing, can we look at the site before it is released?
• John: Yes. My only caveat would be that you not disseminate this further yet. You can see the new UI at the beta.biodiversitylibrary.org website now.
• Grace: Can we get a banner on the new website with a link to the Guide to the New BHL?
• Bianca: We can update the alert message on the current homepage on the BHL Dashboard, but we're not sure where these alerts will show up on the new UI. We can at least use this space to advertise the change on the old website.
• John to ask William about location of alert messages on new UI
• Becky: Reference librarian at CAS beta tested, including with users, and they couldn't really get anything to break.
• John to email William today to see if we can start distributing the materials now (like tweets and little announcements)

Once site launches, if you notice problems, use the feedback link on BHL to report them.

Virtual Macaw workflow for orange bag loading anticipated for summer (Bianca)

• Bianca: I have heard through Joel Richard (SIL and TAG) who developed Macaw (a way to upload content digitized outside IA workflow to IA and BHL), that, best case scenario, there will be a virtual Macaw installation implemented by the Summer. No definite dates yet. So anyone who has digitized content in-house or not through IA will be able to login online to a system that will allow you to upload your files, perform needed pagination work, and send files to IA.
• John: When you say virtual Macaw, are you talking about a remotely hosted instance of Macaw?
• Bianca: Correct, and this would be only a web interface - no local instance needed. Not completely clear on details, but SIL has a technical review board with security concerns, so Macaw is currently under review with them. Joel's development plans have it so he can have something ready by the summer, but whether it's Smithsonian approved is a different situation.
• John: There are a number of advantages to this. For instance, if Joel needs to change codes, he can do it in once place and everyone will get the changes. If each person hosted their own Macaw, it's more difficult to fix bugs or add changes.
• Marty: Does it include mechanisms for structuring documents including article-level metadata?
• John: Current Macaw does allow pagination, actually requires it, to give structure of page chronology.
• Grace: You can indicate article start and stop, illustration, and other designations in Macaw.
• Bianca: If you want more details, you can send your questions to the staff list, as Joel is a member.

Open discussion (all)

General Questions:

Coordinating scanning among global partners:

• John: This has been a much-discussed issue. Right now there has been no satisfactory answer reached. There may never be one. Most discussion has been about trying to reach some higher abstract denominator to sync data between nodes. We haven't found that yet.
• Bianca: Another complication is we have some rather clunky deduplication tools that we encourage everyone to use. Some global institutions have placed bids on serials, but we don't know if we'll ever get that content now. If those bids are for important titles, we need to know when they placed the bid and who to contact about it.
• John: That is a problem. We never really had the concept of a bid expiration.
• Bianca: And there's the larger issue of the scanlist being comprised of only certain BHL member library catalogs. We're missing CAS, Cornell, ANSP, LoC, and others. LoC is now an official SC member of BHL.
• Judy: I understand the complexity of the problem, but if Europe is dissentigrating for the BHL, perhaps we can encourage a clearing house or something. It might not influence what we scan for BHL, but it could make others aware of other digital content available out there. Perhaps we could have this on the public wiki? For instance, Madrid was scanning lots of things, but they also had links to other websites that were scanning things. So maybe if we can't capture it, we can disseminate links to other content available.

Links to Content not in BHL:

• Bianca: That brings up a question: at one point I heard that the new BHL UI will provide links out to content that's scanned but not part of BHL. We would index Madrid and have the metadata in BHL with a link out to Madrid for the content, but their content wouldn't be in our book viewer.
• John: That's the first I ever heard of that.
• Joe: I don't recall anything about that either.
• Judy: That's unfortunate. I don't know the degree of difficulty in that, but it would solve a lot of problems.
• John: Just because we haven't heard of it doesn't mean it's not happening.
• Joe will follow up with William about this
• Bianca: I brought up Madrid because it's an example of content that was loaded into Citebank, so my understanding is that Citebank will be integrated into new UI, since Citebank is not a viable platform. New UI will have article-level access, so all Citebank content is supposed to load into BHL. The user-generated PDFs make me nervous. Many of them are pretty good, but not all of them. Not sure if there will be an opportunity to weed things. If users give feedback about an article, we could theoretically get rid of the content in BHL. But the scale of the work is overwhelming.
• John: If the stuff is moved over, all of it would be moved over. We wouldn't weed things out first.
• Judy: Right, but if it all gets moved over, can we deal with errors after the fact? Like if someone submits feedback to us and tells us that the content is bad, we can remove it on a case-by-case basis?
• Bianca: This is similar to the ingest process, where we just ingested everything within a certain criteria and deal with issues with that content through feedback from users. But at least with the ingest we had a common denominator to get rid of things if they were bad, such as if they dealt with religion.
• Becky: We'll just have to deal with it as it comes in. Perhaps there's a way to notify people about the content we didn't generate, and give them a sort of caveat about it?
• Bianca: My concerns are about the resources to deal with the clean-up process, even with just dealing with the feedback.
• Judy: This is a collection's group topic. If it's random and occasionally, Grace and Bianca can handle it, but if it's a flood, there will have to be another process involving triage.

FYI: IA has asked us to update our (c) metadata for public domain materials. (Bianca)

• We will now use the phrase: "Not in copyright. The BHL affirms that this work is in the public domain."
• see our Copyright page for more info

For everyone sending things to IA, this must be incorporated into the Wonderfetch spreadsheet if your content is public domain.

Next call 21 March, at 11am EST.