January 25, 2011 BHL Executive Committee notes

On call: Tom Garnett, Graham Higley, Connie Rinaldo, Chris Freeland, Martin Kalfatovic

1. Alexandria meeting: Even though Chris couldn't attend, the meeting agenda remained the same. Tom suggested that Adrian Smales prepare a detailed report on the Alexandria meeting. Noha Adley and her staff are ready to put some energy into the BHL so we need to be sure they get what they need from us. Ready to replicate content and existing applications in Egypt along with providing an Arabic front end.
ACTION: Chris/Tom will follow up with Noha once we have the report from Adrian.
ACTION: Skype sessions with BA development team and BHL team next week.
BA totally embedded in EOL program already.

Lola is new program manager in BHL Europe.

2. OCR for latin names in China material: Chris has not heard back from Robert/Brewster with substantive information. Martin will talk with Robert when he is in DC in February. Chris noted that we can go ahead and do this without IA intervention. But we need to get permission from Institute of Botany, since these are not our materials, and then set language to English and the OCR will run. Flora of China no longer accessible--will remain dark and only available to China locally. Metadata are dark, too.

Clarifying copyright rules now. Will follow up with Fenghong when Robert returns from China. Anything that is available in the IA can be part of BHL.

ACTION: Martin and Tom will talk with Robert in February to try one more time to get IA involved in OCR of Chinese latin names.

3. Submitted proposal to Lounsbury for Life and Literature. Will hear at beginning of February. Many parties need to be invited. Possibility of many competing events. Need to send a "keep these dates open"?
2 or 3 vague sentences: dates and Chicago. ACTION: Tom will draft something by tomorrow for review. How many? Tom needs to double check with Field and get max number. Will need to hold some slots.

4. Institutional Council phone call focused on revised BHL governance plan with tiered membership. This was not controversial. Cathy expressed willingness to call each member individually to have a conversation.

5. Chris submitted a progress report to Moore Foundation. There were delays in hiring William. So large surplus. Moore is encouraging Chris to extend the funding into 2012 to cover William and travel. Chris will go to San Francisco to meet with Chris at Moore Foundation to discuss other possible grants (Feb 14).

William Ulate started today!

6. Meeting with Erick Mata: Agenda ready. Tom will share powerpoint once he has Graham's input. Agenda sent to Erick and Don. Erick heading St. Louis the following week to meet with Chris and development team and Dr. Raven.

7. Phil Cryer was in Paris giving a presentation to VIBRANT (Eu funded) (http://vbrant.eu/). WP7 related to "bibliography of life" (David King and David Morse). Twitter is the communications mechanism for Vibrant, now.

8. Martin reported on Digital Libraries for North Africa. Planning stages for developing digital libraries for Africa and planning for next digital library meeting in South Africa. Could have some intersection with BHL in future. Martin will send a report.

9. Graham--quick bid to move Ejournal of Taxonomy forward, led by French.