February 9, 2010 BHL Executive Committee notes

BHL Executive Conference Call Tuesday 9 February at 11 a.m. EST


on call: Tom, Connie, Graham, Chris, Mike Lichtenberg (guest)


Darwin Project Update

Mike will catch us up on this project. Meetings good, communication better face-to-face. Seeing examples of the books from Darwin's library. Review of transcriptions with Nick helped with visualizing project. Scanning and metadata requirements reviewed and helped point to areas that could be improved in our requirements. "Orange bag" problem. Need to get Cambridge U. content. Will add view to page turner to include transcriptions. Only online editing will be for tying to annotations. Flickr model for annotations. View Darwin's library as own set--will require some work on our part. Cambridge will be creating TIFFs and the loose page issue. Darwin inserted pages with detailed comments. Will create supplemental titles out of loose pages--scan as own unit and upload as supplement.


ACTION: Will go forward with the supplement solution--approval by group.


Thank you to Mike for handling this process very well. The solutions are good for the Darwin project and also provide functionality that BHL will use. There is a standing meeting/call on the first Tuesday of every month.


Chris noted that they have a discrete set of work that someone can be hired to do on MOBOT grant.

BHL South America Update



Brazil workshop was very successful. Two main organizations funded for projects that will become BHL South America. Museum of Zoology in Sao Paulo and BIREME (a large aggregator of open access scientific journals--Scielo). Chris, Martin and Tom worked hard and they were appreciative. Will start digitizing rare books but will deliver a large set of open access journals that they want to push into CiteBank. Want something to show by November conference in Chile.


Technology situation is better than expected. Packer (director of Scielo and BIREME) was happy to hear that China was so successful and felt it would be as successful in Brazil. Content sharing is going to happen. Not sure what the infrastructure technology is --got into some details but need to plan collaborative development. One of the Ministers of the Environment was actively participating.


ACTION: Need to start thinking about how to restructure Chris's job. Chris would like to have something for Institutional Council.

BHL China Update
BHL China is close to signing an MOU with Internet Archive. 1 or 2 scribes at the Institute of Botany. 2.5 staff people available and money for scanning by these staff. No problem with copyright for Chinese originated materials.

BHL-Europe Update
Meeting Feb 22 in Berlin. Interim program report should be up on the wiki in a week. Chris noted that there is a lot of activity around descriptive elements for the portal. This is a critical meeting. BHL-Europe is moving forward.

Looking at publishing an ejournal of taxonomy with EDIT. Also there is a data-publishing project. Should create a publishing xml structure that will allow easy re-use. Meeting will develop this structure.

Defacto standard for digital journals used in North and South America taken from NLM DTD. Discussions for taxonomic extensions to this standard (TAXPUB)--Donat, Ubo, South Americans. Tom will be contacting the South American group about markup. Graham can build on this. TAXONLIT is too detailed. The more consensus we can get, the better for the BHL. Goals: get publishers to publish in consistent format and to get visibility for BHL as sustainable storage.
ACTION: Graham will send us the paper he put together.
ACTION: Tom will send links to all of us.

BHL IC publicity update

Conference call with public relations folks at MOBOT, Tom, NHM and others--glossy publicity brochure to be ready for IC. Taking a bit longer than planned. MOBOT PR is putting together a press release for new Bioinformatics Center that includes Moore grant.

Other:


Connie noted:


- the Ernst Mayr Library has hired a metadata librarian. His name is Chris Carden and he started on February 8.


-the IA scribe for Harvard is expected to be here in March.


-the Ernst Mayr Library has been consulting with Countway Library on Medical Heritage Library project. Other libraries involved include Columbia (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/news/libraries/2010/20100106.medicalheritage.html) and Yale with a grant from Sloan via the Open Knowledge Commons.


-IMLS Field Notes grant submitted with CAS as lead. "Connecting Content: A Collaboration to Link Field Notes to Specimens and Published Literature. Participants developed separate small-scale projects: California Academy of Sciences, NYBG, MOBOT, ANSP, Harvard: HUH Botany, MCZ Ernst Mayr Library with lots of help from the Smithsonian. Some information is available on the wiki: Connecting_Content

Chris: Australia--messages from Ely Wallis, Don Hobern indicate they are ready and want a face-to-face meeting in Australia. Focus is mostly on technology. Who should go? No agenda yet. It depends on when the meeting is. Too early to decide. May be more policy than originally thought. Chris will start the agenda building process--on wiki--and start building. Chris noted that the wiki is being opened mostly to the world. Agenda building maybe should be on google docs. This was agreed. Timing? May through August. Find out who they want to come.


Chris noted that citebank.org became available and jumped on it. Following up a way to bring journal content automatically into Biblio. Bridge being developed. Content from Zookeys, Scielo and then articalized data--then can go public.

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