January 4, 2011 BHL Executive Committee notes

BHL Executive Committee Conference Call minutes Tuesday Jan 4, 2011

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

A. China status: Flora of China is copyrighted and a joint international effort. MOBOT publishes it. MOBOT has an online derivative work. It is now in Internet Archive. Should we incorporate it into BHL? Ask China to make dark.
ACTION: Tom to speak with Institute of Botany (Dr. Cui) to determine if it is a mistake.
Chris noted that if it is to remain in IA as open, he needs to notify MOBOT. Next step is to determine if keeping it open is what is desired and then refer to MOBOT editorial board.
ACTION: Keri will follow up with Fenghong to ensure that an IPR field is populated.
Martin noted that when we ingest, we are assuming the material meets copyright rules. It may not all be available. When issues are pointed out, we take problematic material down.

B. OCR and communicating with IA
IA just skips OCR for non-roman languages. But we can use English OCR to pick up binomial names. We could have this done by IA.
At last conversation, Brewster noted that he would not purchase non-Roman language set for ABBY. In China there was discussion about using Tesserect (open source and free). Brewster is happy to have someone else take the lead on non-roman OCR. So now what to do about Chinese lang OCR? Chris noted that we can run the OCR in Woods Hole cluster and upload to IA. This would be an Anthony-Phil shared load.
There would be 2 OCR files--one with english recognition for latin binomials and one with non-roman.
ACTION: Chris will contact Brewster/Robert to discuss re-OCRing the biodiversity non-roman with english character set to extract latin binomials.
Then would need to do some examples with Tesserect. Need Chinese Academy of Sciences to help with this so we will wait and let the Chinese take the lead here when they are ready.

C. Archival derivation: IA wants to stop generating DJVU and b&w pdf files. But we use these files. DJVU files are what we use to chunk up and generate names. We need this for the page breaks. There may be other ways to generate the page breaks. Fedlink is pushing forward our concerns to IA. This would be a contractual change so theoretically nothing could change until July for SI. Should let Toronto and CDL know. ACTION: Chris will send a note to Ivy Anderson and copy us.

D. Martin noted that we should review the pricing changes proposed by IA. The new scheme is very complicated. Why don't they just make it a slight increase overall rather than make it so complicated? ( For example, 150 page books 15 cents a page and 300 page book at 10 cents.....but a cart load would be evaluated and if predominantly 150 pages, all would be charged at that level....bookkeeping nightmare). Lots of problems with accounting. Since this is a proposal perhaps we should respond and suggest raising the base cost.
ACTION: Martin will draft a note from Smithsonian and Exec. council of BHL suggesting that a simpler system, a slight increase across the board, would be endorsed by Smithsonian and BHL Executive Council.

E. BHL IC meeting planning: Long-range planning and governance documents for next IC meeting.
ACTION: all participate.
ACTION: For next IC conference call, Tom will send again and remind us all.

F. Meeting with Erick Matta
ACTION: Tom will send a doodle poll to id best time for meeting with Erick.

G. Darwin's Library: very detailed work. All approvals and clearances are ready. Can bring in Darwin material to BHL. It will be a very interesting collection within BHL.
ACTION: (no one assigned) Market and publicize.

H. BHL Egypt. Adrian needs to be in touch with Noha. Chris will set up Skype/ email work with Noha and reschedule a meeting. EOL work is active there.

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