June 9, 2009 BHL Executive Conference Call

BHL Executive Confernce Call Tuesday June 9 at 11 am.
eBiosphere results: 483 people attended; BHL mentioned in 11 presentations; 1st three days= general session; it emerged that ebiosphere is an enormous, global effort but feeling of lack of coordination/friction; interest in more cohesion


BHL--discussions with Donald Hobern and head of Atlas of Living Australia (Joanne Daly); they have unexpected funding and are interested in creating a BHL-Australia and working with us to digitize what we don't have and also working on software services; Also contacts with India thanks to Neil Sarkar; Also a signing of an MOU with EOL and Chinese Acad of Sciences; Tom had conversations with Institute of Zoology who are interested in pursuing MOA for BHL. Also contacts with Japan for BHL; This is a global effort. Tom talked with Yuko Nagai, secretary general of Japanese Zoological society--have a Bioone-like consortium and they are interested in providing backfiles for BHL. Graham had more conversations with Donald Hobern. DH has money for management and technical work but doesn't have a lot of money for scanning. Graham talked with him about leading an east-asia consortium with New Zealand and Japan and DH was quite interested in moving forward with this idea.

Chris talked about the next 2 days--34 people had to attend eBiosphere as well as 2 days to develop a road map. David Schindel organized and Jim Edwards there, too. We need to find a way to make biodiversity informatics sustainable. Not concrete. Graham, Adrian, Chris, Henning and Phil Cryer met and reviewed next steps for Global BHL (document sent by Tom). To be used for upcoming discussions for BHL-Europe. Things are moving pretty quickly. China has put up a million yuan for EOL China. There are also possible sources for funding BHL in China. Tom wants to send document to IC for institutional council conference call tomorrow, June 10.

This is fabulous but Cathy expressed concern about how we will have enough Chrises to get all of these countries up and running. Need more technical people to make this happen. BHL-Europe should work more with us, not us working for them. We need to marshall time for the technical aspects of the global BHL. Need to plan for this.

These other projects bring technical expertise and will help provide us with the global redundant architecture that we need.

We should be explicit about what technical expertise needs to be available. Have a work plan for BHL Europe but need a global work plan. Need to plan based on where the cash is. Have to get China and Australia signed up and then the work plan can become explicit. Work project 3 for BHL-Europe should be ready in the fall. Chris would be global technical manager and more strategic. Should we look at the network sustainable model similar to OCLC (not pay by the drink) but money should flow to the central structure that supports the global architecture.

Sustainability for organization and sustainability for objects and services--Chris thinks we need to deal with these in parallel but separately but Cathy noted that these are not separable. Tom asked do we really need one central organization? It is that way now but only because we are a few years ahead of the curve. Independently financed and administered hubs that are sharing content. Not necessarily shared through single portal. DNS may be a good model for BHL. OCLC and JSTOR are also models to follow.

This all comes down to the governance piece. Governance meeting with EOL--Cristaian Samper, Richard Lane, Jim Edwards, Eimer Lughadhi, Erick Mata, Graham, Art Sussman. Model that they coalesced on takes some of the EOL structure but globalizes is. Regional EOLs that would run like EOL but Executive team would report to global grouping elected or nominated by each of the regional EOLs. Execs would be paid from pool of money from regional EOLs. Seemed like the right amount of independence to allow response to local conditions but some central coordination. What happens if someone pulled out? Can you get the data back? What if one country went commercial? Graham should have clean notes from this meeting next week. This should be ready for the July IC call. Agreed that the document Tom prepared can be shared with IC. It is an externally oriented document. How we manage global relationships in the long term needs to be discussed soon and resolved within the next 12 months.

The new global BHL is different! All of the regional BHL interest is different than what our expectations are. We have been expecting content contribution to central portal and from one location. In the EU and Chinese and Aus model--content is national content not necessarily heritage content. Money for scanning is not always centrally generated. In Europe scanning will be done locally with local money. Money model is very different in the different regional BHLs. Expansion of BHL as we know it. BHL will acquire additional digital content. There is content already available and they want to "brand" it as BHL or maybe franchise it.

We need to prepare the IC for the new approach to funding. Have to be sure no current participants are marginalized. There will be other roles besides digitizing. We need to leverage BHL to get money for local projects. University of Illinois is a model like this.

Graham had lunch with Roger Mitchell from Arcadia Foundation. They have to invite you to bid, no applications. Interest in historical artifacts. They are interested that we are digitizing rare items. Lisbet Rausing is founder and has ties with Harvard. Connie will send IMLS information to Graham. The other funding possibility is for lobbying.

Chris had conversations with Rich Pyle and ICZN--within 6 months ratification of electronic publishing of taxonomic names. All should be in BHL. We need to create a national repository through NSF for these documents.

Poster presentation submitted by Connie and Cathy for Ecological Society of America accepted. Albuquerque in August.

Graham noted that one of the delegates at eBiosphere asked--are you going to encompass institutional repositories? Perhaps one day--keep it in mind. If we get their metadata in some standard format, we can point. Managing it will be nightmarish. Are there any legal issues? It is another component of CiteBank.

Next call: June 23 at 11 AM EDT
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