February 5, 2008 BHL Executive Committee Notes

Biodiversity Heritage Library Executive Committee Conference Call February 5, 2008

Tom--Dr. Packer is digitizing Latin American literature with government funding. Wants to work with us and will share (http://www.scielo.org/php/index.php). This is an example of one project--he may want to build something different for biodiversity information and he has money to build a new site on Fedora Commons. Wants to have a workshop in early September about BHL and Scielo. Wants to interoperate with us. We should think about retrieving the material. There is a whole Latin American contingent that we can organize. BHL may be a lightning rod for practicing biologists.
Tom will be following up on Chinese contacts for BHL issues. There is interest in digitizing Chinese biodiversity literature. Tom wants to bring together Chinese contacts in US and China to work on this. Graham has some good contacts from China, eg. Le Kang. Don't do anything until after the Olympics because the government is highly focused on the Olympics right now. Chinese Acad. of Sciences has a huge new building (holds 10,000 scientists) in Peking right next to new Olympic stadium. Should be moving in around now. May need to go to China with a small delegation but no need to rush.
Penn State and Brewster talked about continuing work on automated mark up. Can we get this from BHL budget? Not until we know what will happen with JP2 issue.

Tom is meeting with Edward Van den Berger director of OBIS (http://www.iobis.org/)

IA and delivery of JP2: submit statement of problems to Brewster. Easiest solution may be to just provide the Lizardtech/Luratech installation in CA. Chris tried that but it was casual. We should be more forceful. Connectivity at IA may be an issue--we need figures, not the current response "enough". Long term solution may require us to host jp2 outside of IA. With the launch, there will be lots of visibility. Need to get status before TED meeting. Tom, Chuck Miller (CIO MOBOT) and Chris should discuss who should meet with Brewster and implement plan.

Biodiversity Collections Index meeting: interested in how they can work with BHL (Roger Hyam).

Tom is investigating trademarking the logo. Simple. One institution owns logo and gives free and unhindered use for other members.

Tom will post about BHL to EOL blog. On a regular basis will bring materials from BHL blog to EOL blog.

Connie: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology may be interested in digitizing publications. Not on BHL money but MCZ may process and send through BPL, not for BHL. IMLS grant has been submitted successfully! BHL and EOL will be featured in a brief CRL News article on zoology web sites.

Graham: OCR scanning experience--Henning Scholz will develop and lead BHL Europe (eContentplus funding for managing scanning in Europe. Not paying for scanning. Multi languages. Graham will meet him in Luxembourg next week and it would be helpful if he attended the Architecture meeting. Refunding by German Research Ministry (led by Francisco Welter-Schulz) for project on zoological materials (Animalbase: http://www.animalbase.de/). We need to know the format, metadata etc. they are using. Graham will be visiting and discussing standards package for the European Digital Library.
Cathy: Collection development tool--Cathy will follow up.

Chris started agenda for architecture meeting. Ingesting materials from IA through mid Nov. in portal; Taxonfinder indexing just through Oct 28. Taxonfinder was down until this morning.

Next call is Feb 12 at 11 AM EST, 10 AM CST, 4 PM GMT