June 30, 2009 BHL Executive Conference Call

BHL Executive Conference Call June 30, 2009
Martin, Chris and Tom met with the CDL yesterday afternoon and there was an unambiguous signal to ingest. The load will happen after a press release. Chris will have Mike L. ingest into the beta site.

CDL is involved in Hathi Trust. We need to monitor and have discussions about this.

Martin: There was an informative meeting with Internet Archive. Discussion with Peter Brantley--regarding Google book settlement. Peter is IA point person for responding to Google Book settlement. He is tracking all the related issues. Smithsonian has been contacted by DOJ for response regarding an antitrust suit. So working together. DOJ is looking at privacy issues as well as from the perspective of antitrust.

Chris: Met with various members of the IA technical team (Raj, Sam and George Oates). Learned that IA has released a new site called a book server that tries to leverage the Stanza format. It is hoped that they can expose their book information--a precursor to having IA books on mobile devices. Book viewer/APIs undocumented and BHL pieces may be integrated. IA is now supporting S3 API--it drops files into archive.org--a way for users to create own files without permission of IA (e.g. adding name.xml). Some testing will be done.

The only place the names live right now is in BHL. This would provide some redundancy. Might also help with exchanging data--using IA as pickup and dropoff point. Could scan a book here and drop it off there. Could be solution to "orange bag" problem.

IA are in agreement that archive data should be available on servers in other places. Need a way for Chris's group to be alerted...but it will be dropped off into BHL part and IA will OCR.

Martin: Open Library (George Oates space designer): We should track and watch but new interface seems fabulous and should incorporate some ideas into BHL portal.

Tom: Arizona State is a hotbed of biodiversity information!

Upcoming Institutional Council call: Deputy Director appointment, Cathy needs to step down; also must discuss scanning allocations with reduced funding.

Tom: received email from Chinese Academy of Sciences wondering where the MOU is. Tom is planning to send a draft for their review next week. Should be in place this summer. The world has changed for BHL--the project has been very successful and is becoming global. Tom and Chris will meet with Jim Omura from Moore Foundation tomorrow with plans to open a discussion about a greater level of funding--to address BHL Europe, BHL, BHL China, maybe Australia and India.

To keep these in sync, resources are needed that were not in the previous funding. The seed money from MacArthur got us going but need several "project leader" positions to keep everything moving and in sync. Should be technological positions.

Graham mentioned that he is looking for funding of management positions from Arcadia Trust for similar reasons, but they are not currently giving grants.

Tomorrow is a meeting with California Academy of Sciences to meet with Library and Scientific staff. A similar meeting will take place at ANSP in July.

Graham suggested Tom talk with William Y Brown (President), who is interested in BHL and EOL.

Graham spoke with Adrian today and he and Bernard had an exciting meeting with a company today that thinks they have a solution to the pick-list problem: putting together a master list of everyone's choices.

NEXT CALL July 14 at 11 AM EDT