February 23rd ECSC Conference Call
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Proposed Agenda:
- Technical Update (Chris)
- Introduction: Grace Costantino, BHL Program Manager (Grace)
- Financial/Budget Update (Martin/Tom)
- Global Updates (Chris/Martin)
- Upcoming Conferences/Meetings (everyone)
- Reminder: In-Kind Contributions Spreadsheet
Notes:
On call: Tom Garnett, Martin Kalfatovic, Jane Smith, Grace Costantino, Cathy Norton, Jean Farrington, Connie Rinaldo, Susan Fraser, Doug Holland
1. Chris sent a few technical items to Tom: search improvements in the BHL portal are nearly ready. Grace noted that page links to Flickr item are being added. MOBOT developed a script to add link to specific page. Martin noted that as part of user interface for paginating, things can be tagged to go into Flickr. Grace is working on a blog post about Flickr work. Chris and MOBOT staff meeting with gaming developer to see if there are collaborations with gaming community to use BHL content. Could be big or not--might be a big help to crowdsourcing. Hope to have a report by March meeting.
2. Grace Costantino is BHL Program Manager--full time at BHL and will handle administrative details as time goes on. Welcome Grace.
3. Grace commented on the Life and Literature staff report. Report attached to this page. Article level access, better search, ingestion of already scanned literature, and harmonizing BHL family of portals are the key points.
4. Grace noted that dues have been received from Cal Acad, MCZ, Kew, MCZ, NYBG; (Harvard Botany, MOBOT, NHM and AMNH expected)
5. Tom raised some finance issues: MacArthur ending. We have Steering Committee dues and permission to carry over unspent MacArthur money after August. There is some unallocated MacArthur money and we have leeway on how to allocate it (possibly as much as $100,000). Stlll waiting on final cost of Life and LIt but may be some funding left over that can be reallocated. March discussions will include how to allocate these funds.
6. Must, Should, Could Spreadsheet (attached and most up to date copy here). This is not definitive. This will be presented to EOL Executive Committee, where he hopes to argue for more money for BHL. There is very little scanning money post-August. We have had some success finding grant money for technical development, but much harder to find scanning money.
7. In-kind funding spreadsheet: Grace noted that the spreadsheet has an error on the second page of the worksheet. If you want to use the worksheet, use the corrected spreadsheet on this wikipage.
8. Global updates: Working on the global BHL is complicated. There will be a global BHL meeting in Berlin June 7 and 8, right after transitional meeting for BHL Europe. China, Australia have agreed to come. Waiting for Brazil and Egypt. Hoping to have a Global Technical meeting as well. Will be contacting people for the technical group to invite.
9. Submitted a proposal to fund a meeting at SANBI (South African National Biodiversity Institute) for some US BHL colleagues to meet with African colleagues/potential stakeholders from many African countries to explore African scanning opportunities. Funding proposed for US and African travellers to South Africa.
10. Martin noted that Brasilian BHL/EOL colleagues will be coming here for a BHL boot camp to give overview of technical issues. 3 members of SciELO team will come for orientation. Mike Lichtenberg and William Ulate will attend as well.
11. Other reports: BHL Australia has had some funding changes. Australian content is being ingested now but they would like to have content ingested in batches. 5000 Chinese books will be in the BHL portal shortly. Multiple continents sharing biodiversity worldwide.....
12. Upcoming conferences: Share: Webwise is happening next week--man of the Connecting Content group will attend. There is a planning meeting for the next ebiosphere meeting in Copenhagen this summer. Erick Mata will be there from EOL. Possible in London in 2013.
13. Cathy sent out election nomination message--please review and make nominations. Send to Cathy (cnorton@mbl.edu)
AND Nancy (GwinnN@si.edu). Need to review by-laws to ensure language is consistent. Elections for Vice-chair and secretary. Nancy is working on a draft revision of bylaws.
14. No call next week.
