February 21st

February 21st Conference Call

Proposed Agenda:
Notes:On Call: Martin, William, Susan, Nancy

Martin encouraged everyone to complete and submit the in-kind support document.

Nancy reported on the EOL meeting indicating that Erick Mata and Bob Corrigan were both supportive of the idea of joint fundraising with the idea of integrating the funding requests with a focus on the outcomes of core activities such as OCR corrections.

The next IC meeting is scheduled for May 6 and 7 at Woods Hole. Not sure if travel can be supported with MacArthur money but Smithsonian still trying to balance that budget. There is a minimum of 12K.

We should revisit the membership document at the IC meeting. Since only two institutions are not Steering committee members we need to think about that level of membership.

William provided brief tech update indicating that Beta testers made good comments on the new interface . Some did not like the look of the Table of Contents that shows articles. Grace and Bianca are preparing materials for outreach. Portal should be ready in early March.

BHL Africa will launch April 15-17 in Pretoria. Global BHL meeting will be held in Africa (Morocco?) May 27-29. China is requesting a letter of invitation. BHL Europe is currently dormant but a core group of volunteers trying to keep it alive --including Heimo Ranier (Natural History Museum Vienna) and Jiri (Prague) and others....

William attended two meetings, one in South Africa where SANBI wanted to review their plans of developing a Biodiversity Information System: a suggestion came out that international initiatives should be on trying to integrate their services and offer a one solution, rather than each country or region having to approach them separately. Donald Hobern from GBIF suggested that he would use some funds left from the Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC) last year to do this after the Global Biodiversity Informatics Outlook (GBIO) comes out. The other meeting William attended was pro-iBiosphere in Leiden, Netherlands. It was a one day meeting with the different initiatives that work on Biodiversity Literature References or Citations and they sketched a way to work together and exchange information. Following the meeting, there was a workshop of the initiatives that are marking up legacy literature (from BHL) and publshing new digital content with the markup already included. A request that came from that meeting was that BHL should assign DOIs to the legacy literature articles. William also commented that Open University has interesting project developing a tool to allow corrections of the OCR text in BHL.

Tomoko Steen is our LC contact for the Steering committee. She has not connected yet with BHL