June 28th ECSC Conference Call
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Proposed Agenda:
- Financial/Budget Update (Martin)
- EOL Sloan award
- Final version of "in kind" documentation will be ready shortly
- Meeting Updates
- BHL Europe
- BHL Africa
- ALA Annual
- Global Updates (Chris/Martin)
- Technical Update (Chris)
- Upcoming and Ongoing Conferences/Meetings (everyone)
- CBHL
- Ecological Society of America (Portland, 5-10 August 2012)
- Membership
Notes:
Financial Updates
EOL Sloan Award
EOL submitted a proposal for a special Sloan foundation award. EOL received the grant, equaling 1 million USD for 2 years. Funds will go to support the bioinformatics group and secretariat.
Action Item: Holly to emphasize need to support BHL Cluster at MBL with Nathan next time they talk. Holly will inform Martin when she has this discussion.
In-Kind Contributions
Martin and Grace have finalized the spreadsheet and sent it out to the Executive group.
Action Item: GC and MK will review it once more and send out to entire group by August, 2012.
BHL Financials
GC and MK have created a system to managing all BHL funding sources. This group will propose budgets for some of these funds, like Dues and Donations. Need a spending plan in place for those funds before the next membership dues come in. MK will be in touch in future regarding development of budgets.
Meetings
BHL-Europe
Jane Update: The BHL-E meetings consisted of tree days of meetings, including a closed review on Wednesday, June 6, by EU funding group. The meetings were an opportunity to get input from related but separate groups like GBIF and discuss how BHL can collaborate more with them.
Products from BHL-E are interesting but technical challenges have only recently been sorted out, thus there is still a little more work necessary in order to finish the GRIB and complete ingestion of content lined up to go into portal. Ingestion likely to be completed by beginning Autumn. GRIB completion likely to take another 12 months.
Still a willingness to carry on developing BHL-Europe, mostly from Berlin and NHM. NHM will host repository at least for next 5 years. Virtual Exhibition Site could be enticing tool to pull together content and make virtual exhibitions.
The BHL Group and EU commissioners thanked Graham Higley and Henning Scholz for their contributions. EU Commissioners were overall positive about BHL-E project.
BHL-Africa
Notes - June 14
Notes - June 15
Martin Update: BHL-Africa meetings occurred June 14-15 in Cape Town, South Africa. A group of 6 BHL-US staff attended this series of meetings funded by JRS foundation. Staff included Martin Kalfatovic, Nancy Gwinn, Christine Giannoni, William Ulate, Doug Holland (filling in for Chris Freeland), and Grace Costantino. The meetings were coordinated by William Ulate and Anne-Lise Fourie of SANBI.
The group also attended the SANBI meetings that occurred before the BHL-Africa meetings on June 12-13. William and Ria Groenewald (of University of Pretoria) gave presentations on BHL-Global and the need for a BHL-Africa, respectively.
25 people attended the BHL-Africa meetings, representing 6 African countries.
Best outcome: laying groudnwork for BHL-Africa governance structure. Nancy also worked with key participants to line up potential leadership positions (primarily from Kenya, South Africa). Timeline for MOU set up and official launch to happen in conjunction with Berlin10 in November.
Participants also agreed to work with our scanlist and perhaps GRIB in future.
Part of JRS funding involves a printed and distributed report on Africa and Life and Literature meetings. By November we will publish report on these two meetings.
ALA Annual
BHL did not have a booth at Annual, though SIL did. BHL was very popular at the SIL booth. Many brochures were handed out. BHL was the main topic for the booth - main types of questions were asked about BHL.
Martin gave presentation on linked data at Libraries, Archives and Museums in conjunction with ALA. He had a section about BHL and nearly all 100 attendees knew about BHL already. This proves we are achieving good saturation of library community for BHL.
CBHL
Susan, Doug, and Judy giving presentation at CBHL on BHL and field notebooks. Robin Everly at SIL also giving BHL presentation at CBHL.
ESA
Connie will be manning booth for BHL, shared with EOL, at ESA 2012 in Portland, OR at the beginning of August.
IAMSLIC
Connie will also be presenting a paper on BHL at the International Association of Aquatic and Marine Science Libraries and Information Centers conference at end of August.
BHL-Staff and Technical Meeting
This meeting is aimed to be held in Sept at NYBG. The details will be discussed at the next EC meeting. Will see how much funding there is to support as much participation as possible.
Global Updates
Notes - June 7
Notes - June 8
Had 3rd BHL-Global meeting after BHL-E meeting, held in Berlin, June 7-8. US/UK attendees included: Martin Kalfatovic, Nancy Gwinn, Bianca Crowley, William Ulate, Grace Costantino, Joel Richard, John Migneault, Connie Rinaldo, Graham Higley, and Jane Smith.
Highlight: Formation of a global steering committee. Ely Wallis elected Chair, Henning Scholz Vice-Chair, Nancy Gwinn Secretary. Also tentatively planned to have the 4th global meeting in October 2013 at Museum Victoria.
The global group will continue to work on infrastructure of global BHL.
Each node also gave an update on progress, which was great opportunity to see what everyone is doing.
BHL-Australia will merge with BHL-US/UK, due to end of AU funding. We will incorporate the AU UI design with BHL-US and the separate BHL-AU portal will be phased out. BHL-US/UK portal will thus be the portal for both US and AU.
Technical Updates
We will be working on merging with AU portal. We are hoping to fund Simon Sherrin from Museum Victoria to get together with Mike Lichtenberg in future to work out details.
We will continue to work with BHL cluster at Woods Hole, which needs to be effectively maintained, especially as we move into NEH project.
Membership
- USGS agreed to join at Steering Committee level. Once details worked out on transferring funds, Richard Huffine will join SC, hopefully before October.
- LoC will also join BHL at SC level. Complications with transferring LoC funds. Hopefully before or shortly after end of fiscal year they will officially join. We are revising membership process, so LoC has just had verbal discussions of membership process. Don't know who representative will be yet, probably someone from science division.
- NAL - Martin and Nancy will meet with NAL before July 13 to discuss BHL membership, following up with previous discussions over past 4 years.
- Richard Hulser at LA County Natural History Museum is interested in joining at the Institutional Council level. A subgroup is working on revising membership documents, after which we will get back in touch with Hulser.
Membership Process
Document available in agenda above.
Connie: At our last IC meeting, a group was formed to revise the current membership document. We are presenting a draft today. We made the document leaner and took wording from the governance document so that they now agree. Group added a fee for institutional council members - arbitrarily set at 1000 - not set on this amount but between 500-1000 seems like a good ballpark
The old document did not much on withdrawal/removal of members, but there was some content on this in the in governance doc. The group added a statement to the membership doc, influenced by the Governance Doc. Section includes non-payment of dues as reason for withdrawal/removal.
Actual application process is similar to what it was in the previous doc, although the group did change a few things related to the depth of information about potential organizations needed in the application process. Now only asking for basic information about the library and technical infrastructure.
The group also added a statement of interest in BHL requirement, which will require potential members to tell us why they want to join.
Martin: we need to harmonize all of our docs. We have the MOUs, Governance Doc and this document.
Next Steps:
Step One: revise doc to get nomenclature aligned with other available documents (Martin and Connie).
Step Two: send revised doc to wider group for comments. Give group approximately 1 week to review. Connie will send out document to group. Comments should be sent to Connie.
Round Robin
NHM
Jane: NHM has a new head of ITC, Dave Thomas. This appointment will help with ongoing commitment to BHL-E. NHM is also carrying on with scanning.
MCZ
Connie: Just interviewed for EOL podcast (podcast about lion genetics). Made several mentions of BHL.
CAS
Becky: All CAS field notebooks are now in BHL. Continuing on grant project and hope to get intern who will tidy up scientific names for use in BHL and other name finding technology.
ConnieR Jun 26, 2012