March 31, 2009 BHL Executive Conference Call

BHL Executive Committee Phone Call March 31, 2009

• allocation decisions

After the IC meeting and the announcement about the inability to reallocate funds to keep scanning going, but in effect TG can borrow money from Smithsonian to reallocate within the grant. When the second round of funding comes, money will be repaid. This is urgent because otherwise the NHM scanner would be laid off and it will be difficult to rehire NYBG is ready with a large amount of stuff. MCZ will fill in the Woods Hole gap. Awaiting Jim Edwards ok. Great news! Thank you Nancy for your flexibility.

• BHL IC follow-up

No loose ends or related action items. Bianca will visit NYBG in 2 weeks and FMNH in July. She will be scheduling AMNH in a month or so. This will help with creating collection profiles. Tom is integrating Chris's project file with the panoramic picture for strategic plan. Chris notes that the project document is static and the work is dynamic. Chris has put info into "Redmine" which allows assignment and presents more of a living document. Tom just wants a big picture snapshot with a view towards relationships among projects, not really exact dates. Graham suggested that Tom present mainly a bigger picture, not the details.

Cathy is planning the phone call regarding membership. Connie will organize the conference call. Tom will work with Elizabeth Babcock to pull together publicity group.


• Chris's Issues
Article stats: growing--people are using them. 880 pdfs created to date (200/week). 35% have article info. submitted. Chris will put a poster together for TDWG. One of the tasks from Architecture was to come up with a working title for repository: CiteBank--Connie and Graham not too happy. Redmine is a project management tool (iused gemini but running only under mobot.org). Need wiki etc. to include Bhl Europe. Redmine seems to be a good choice. This will be outward facing progress of software development/hardware development.

Image viewer--once image loads, it is an enhancement but it does take awhile to load. Can we run server at Smithsonian, Woods Hole? Discussions this afternoon/tomorrow at the institutions. WoodsHole may bring it up right away with no charge initially. Don't want to roll out new image viewer if it is going to be slow. May be able to run it at IA, too. Phil is working on distributed cluster storage solution as another way to protect data. Catalina Island meeting is becoming a logistical nightmare. Chris would like to have a separate meeting. Tom noted that this group (Decapod etc. group) has done very important thinking about the literature so it is important to follow up.

• BHL-Europe
Cui Jinzhong from China will attend BHL Europe meeting. BHL Europe schedule is still under development due to attendance difficulties.

• E-biosphere: 260 signed up; Tom G. coming and is not sure if he might be staffing the EOL booth, Graham is planning a big NHM BHL booth: Connie and Cathy willing to help and attend. Dr Keping Ma will be at e-biosphere meeting and there may be some BHL China discussions.

We wondered where Sarah Palin has been lately.

Next call Tuesday April 7 at 11 AM EST, 10 AM CST, 4 PM GMT