July 13 (Executive Committee)

13 July 2017

BHL Executive Committee Call

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• Connie Rinaldo, Jane Smith, Doug Holland, Nancy Gwinn, Martin Kalfatovic

AGENDA and NOTES

• Secretariat Update (MRK)
  • It's a Girl. Bianca had her little girl (Saoirse Lila Crowley, 7lbs, 6oz) on Wednesday 3:32 a.m. (Eastern). A bit ahead of schedule, but she's had her maternity plan worked out for a while.
  • Next Members Call. Next Members call will be on 3 August and be a combined July/August meeting
  • Reprinting/Design of BHL Brochure. We need to reprint the BHL brochure. The question of including Member names on the printed brochure. We now have more Members than we design room for. Discussion of options. BHL EC would like to see all the Members' institutional names appear on the back of the brochure (not as an insert). EC realizes that this will mean smaller fonts and redesign of the back. EC directed Grace to provide some examples of how this might look. ACTION: Grace will provide some design options by 15 September 2017 for EC to review.
  • Upcoming Travel. MRK and Carolyn will be at the International Botanical Congress (Shenzhen) 21-28 July. There will be a BHL Symposium at the Congress with participation from BHL China, BHL Singapore, Missouri Botanical Garden, and two non-BHL
  • Internet Archive Annual Event and Leaders Forum 2017. Will take place in San Francisco, 11-13 October 2017.
  • Letter of Support for the Chicago Botanic Garden. A BHL letter of support was provided for the Chicago Botanic Garden to conserve, digitize, and contribute to BHL 63 rare volumes on the Language of Flowers.
  • 2016 BHL Annual Report. Will be published shortly, waiting for one more review.

• Technical Update (MRK)
  • Use of User Supplied Metadata for Articles. After discussion with the technical team, my recommendation is that we DO NOT include it and modify the PDF generator to exclude collection of that information. Mike noted: "There is a definite user benefit to keeping the Title/Author/Subject inputs. That information gets included on the PDF title page and embedded in the PDF metadata, thereby making it possible to easily search and index the PDFs. If we take those away entirely, I imagine some of our heavy PDF generators will be upset at no longer being able to easily find individual articles in their library of PDFs. It might make more sense to change the text on the dialog to reflect the benefits for searching/indexing PDFs, rather than suggesting that BHL will do anything with the data."
  • Tech Meeting (September). MRK will invite a few additional staff to attend (parent institution will need to fund this). Joe De Veer will attend since he'll already be there for the NDSR meeting.
  • Google Analytics. A new custom dimension will be added to GA that will allow for more refined data on use of content by digitization sponsor. For this to generate good data, we'll need to enter data consistently. As per the way GA works, data will only start to be collected as of when the change was made (in the next few weeks). This feature joins other custom dimensions that have been added to GA that will provide more granular usage data for BHL partners/contributors.
  • Full Text Search. Mike is setting up the Elastic search server.
  • Monitoring Site Performance. New server monitoring services have been set up on the BHL servers to alert us on any issues that might come up.

• Topics from the Chair (Connie)
  • ILL Update (Connie). We need to make a decision: do we include members only or affiliates as well in any ILL options (like the listserv)? Does it really matter since we are going with "institutional policies" as the standard? My suggestion is that all partners should be included, but ILL should not be an articulated benefit on the benefit list. Is this statement enough of a guideline to send to the Collections Committee or do we need more specifics? The CC could set up the ILL listserv and wikipage with institutional policies (they were offering to help). The decision is to let ILL happen organically according to institutional policies.
    • This motion carried at the Annual Meeting: “BHL will no longer have an explicit ILL agreement as part of the BHL MOU.” The new "policy" can be stated as: BHL will adopt a flexible ILL “understanding” that can be applied in accordance with individual institutional policies. Some institutions can provide international ILL and some can provide free ILL services but others may have different policies. For instance, at Harvard, anything requested from the Ernst Mayr Library through standard ILL channels should have no charge associated with the request and we lend internationally.
    • Requests may be made through standard ILL channels with standard policies
    • Reciprocity/fee structure is a decision of the lender based on institutional policies
  • DPLA Membership Fees. DPLA will implement a US$10,000 (or US$12,500) fee for hubs in the upcoming year. What is the BHL plan for handling this? MRK will explore some options and Smithsonian will explore the options of a shared BHL/Smithsonian option.
  • Report on Liber conference (Jane).Liber 2017, Patras Greece 5-7 July 2017. Joint paper Jane, Connie and Martin “ Museum Libraries as change agent in science “. The paper focussed on the commonalities and difference between our three institutions and the benefits of collaborating through BHL. The Theme of the conference was “Libraries powering sustainable knowledge in the digital age and was attending by about 350 delegates. Our paper was one of three in a parallel session on sustainability and attended by 45 people. Our paper also generated the most questions and comments. Contacts to follow up interest in contributing content.
  • Attendance at CETAF. Connie will attend.
  • GBIF Update. Connie will attend as the Delegation Lead; Martin will attend as the Node Manager.
  • EOL Update (Connie). No updates have been presented.

• Planning for 2018 Annual Meeting (MRK/Connie/Carolyn)
  • Richard Hulser noted on 11 July 2017:
    • I suggested to Connie that it would be good for the NDSR mentors to get together since we likely will all be at the annual meeting. If so that would need to be slotted into the schedule
    • I am still working on a revised estimate of costs based on the draft agenda we all discussed – I have been focused on the NHMLAC FY17 closure of projects so just getting back to that. I will coordinate with Susan and provide an update in the next week or two
    • As I mentioned in my note on 6/3/17, I had a meeting with the NHMLAC Advancement team who expressed an interest in ‘hosting’ the evening reception if it could be combined with their NHMLAC Fellows event. This would be a combined event of BHL and the NHMLAC Fellows. The Fellows typically have a ‘learning aspect’ to the event so a programmatic aspect including a BHL talk and a talk by a BHL user from NHMLAC as Martin suggested would work well

• Other
  • Membership benefits articulation/other membership models. Doug and Connie will continue to work on this.