June 8 (Executive Committee)

8 June 2017

BHL Executive Committee Call

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

AGENDA and NOTES

• Secretariat Update (MRK)
  • iDigBio Meeting Report. MRK reported on the recent Biodiversity Data conference. There will be a BHL blog post shortly on the topic.
  • OCLC update. Bianca is working with OCLC on BHL related metadata issues. OCLC asked for a delay while the do some other work; BHL will revisit in the fall.
  • LC Meeting report. MRK reported on the recent BHL presentation for LC staff on BHL that included a demo by Carolyn Sheffield. Thanks to Tomoko Steen for organizing. There will be a BHL blog post shortly on the topic.
  • BHL Emergency Planning Discussion. After comments on the recent NDSR call, MRK proposed that the Secretariat develop a tiered sustainability plan in the event support for BHL from partners is decreased. This will be similar to the exercise done near the end of the MacArthur grant.
  • Assistance with Membership Committee work by Secretariat. MRK confirmed that Carolyn Sheffield is the staff liaison to the Membership Committee. Connie suggested that Carolyn schedule a call with Doug, Jane, Martin, and Connie (if available) to discuss Committee workflow and paperwork. A call for the membership committee will follow.

• Technical Update (MRK)
  • Holding Institution (blog post announcement published Monday)
  • Tech team implemented a private Slack channel for ongoing work
  • Full text servers are now being installed at the SI Data Center
  • Database performance. Recently there have been some brief periods of slow responsiveness from the database, picked up by site monitoring tools. This has (so far) only happened outside of regular U.S. business hours, and may be related to a user harvesting name bibliographies via our APIs. Nothing actionable right now, but worth keeping an eye on. Joel and Mike have discussed setting up some additional monitoring tools at SI.
  • OAI ResourceSync – This is a new standard from the same folks that created OAI-PMH… in fact ResourceSync is a replacement for PMH (Protocol for Metadata Harvesting).
• Topics from the Chair (Connie)
  • Grant proposal topics. Proposal process and some suggested ideas were discussed.
  • Partnership Updates. New outreach and status. Nancy Gwinn is working with Yale on BHL membership and we expect an application soon.
  • Biodiversity Library of Southeast Asia: http://blsea.nus.edu.sg/en/home. Connie and Martin will follow up on this with a regularly scheduled call with Wai Yin.
  • Development of Timeline and Process for Strategic Planning. As per the discussion at the 2017 Annual meeting, Jane and Carolyn will develop a draft strategic plan for review by the EC by 15 August. EC will review and comment on this plan through 30 September. The plan will be discussed on the October Members' call. At that point, there will be a call for a small group of volunteers to create a final draft by early February 2018 that can then be distributed to Members for final discussion/amendendation/approval at the March 2018 Meeting.
• Planning for 2018 Annual Meeting (MRK/Connie/Carolyn)
  • Richard Hulser is working on getting room assignments and will get back to the Secretariat soon. He also raised the idea of having a portion of the event attended by the LACMNH "Fellows" group (a donor group). More details and impact to come.
• Other