March 6, 2008 BHL Executive Committee Notes

6 March, 2008 BHL Executive Committee Conference Call


A. EOL Steering Committee report – Graham

1. EOL launch: demo of portal from Paddy Patterson; reasonably happy with it; next up of interest include fungi and parasites and a plant group; Jim will negotiate for resources for these. Invasive species and ecosystems were discussed but definitions are too difficult for invasives and for ecosystems there is no really good agreed indexing/ taxonomy for ecosystems. Discussed the building the EOL staff team-- team-building exercise in spring. Possible partnerships--GBIF (yes), CABI (no), Wikimedia (yes for community and components of research part of EOL). Informatics team can focus on the scholarly part of the site. Fred von Lohmann gave presentation on "Safe Harbor" (if bad stuff appears on your site, it is not your problem?? but someone must be listed as a contact). Donat's email and Swiss lawyer view of copyright....conceptually interesting but won't make a difference to BHL but may affect what people can extract from BHL scans.
MacArthur encouraging EOL to spend more money. May be bad news for BHL because we are behind in spending.
Atlas of Living Australia has joined EOL. Donald Hobern is interested in how to connect Australia literature to BHL. EOL steering committee will add member from Institutional Council and someone from Atlas of Living Australia.
Launch was a bit rough. Need better skills in systems management and delivery. Fixed by day 2 with discussions for changes with Graham and Chuck Miller. Think about architecture and how it should be designed to allow substantial growth. Could easily go up to 25 million hits a day when EOL more fully populated. Rather than pushing for general public section up by May, will be reviewing the architecture to build in resilience at the design stage.

2. Moore foundation
EOL presentation with questions. Jim Omura and others spent more time questioning--seemed somewhat negatively received.

3. Internet Archive

Visited Brewster Kahle--no equipment was working. Lots of hardware and few people. Brewster said IA is an archive, not a service-based organization; stores stuff but not about production and delivery.

B. TED conference – Graham, Tom
Good for those who were allowed in (Jim Edwards, Paddy) but good contacts picked up: companies interested in design and Jeff Bezos from Amazon interested in load-balancing and other technologies. Interested in hosting EOL?? Should the production EOL service be hosted by EOL or someone else? Sun Microsystems also interested in same topics including hosting.

C. Moore Foundation discussions (please reference Chris’ recent emails) - Chris
Chris was at IA and Moore Foundation. Issues..Jim Omura interested in funding Jpeg 2000 server effort (200000); also interested in automated markup--must say why an open source solution is necessary (non open is too expensive, not flexible enough) interested in providing lots of money.
Wants the grant from some other organization than IA or MOBOT.
Chris Menzel is taking over for Jim Omura. Moore Family is adding 5 Billion to the foundation and they are having trouble spending.

1. JP2 Development next steps
Martin wants to pursue proposal for Smithsonian--can serve more than BHL, Smithsonian. MOBOT could be on sub-award.
Moore Foundation would like to roll JP2 this into Fedora. Arizona State might be a resource.

2. Automated markup next steps:
needs to involve Donat Agosti; Penn State (Lee Giles). Tom will draft a statement to Moore Foundation. Automated mark up is more and more important for publisher relations. Moore foundation may be interested in OCR if you add it to the mark up problem. Tech people at TED are not very interested in OCR.

D. Internet Archive open issues
Chris met with Raj at IA about tiling off the jpeg2s. Raj has a version 0.1 for us to evaluate. Now we grab, move to server and decode through existing mechanisms but better version is to have the decoding at IA and Raj is working on this. Open Library meeting-- talked to Barbara Preece and also Sharon from LC (open source page turner). All talked with Brewster about differences among projects. Brewster--OCA is loose grouping--scan and open access, IA is where stored-archive; Open Library is presentation interface (also BHL). So Brewster is not so interested in front end at the moment.
Open Library is great idea and have engineered a back end system when a database might have been just as good. How does this fit into current library workflows (ILS). Not clear where this is headed. Can't really offer much to BHL at the moment. BHL has clear direction and on the right track.

E. Robert Miller phone call to TG
Robert has heard rumors that BHL has concerns. Tom reviewed the concerns and noted which ones were not really IA but then there is the backlog with hundreds of items not cleared for 45 or more days. He agreed something needed to be done. Tom and Cathy should have a phone call in April with Robert. Curation has to do with pages being skipped. IA has posted books with lots of pages missing--QA is not working well. Cathy sends copies of problems to Paul at BLC/BPL/IA and copies Robert. QA is Robert's domain.

F. Request by Tom Garnett for admin support for permission and copyright tracking. I am getting increasingly hit by more and more publishers. This is going to ramp up significantly. Just keeping track is becoming a significant chore. Nancy Gwinn is willing to offer a percentage of a very good SIL staff member (Erin Rushing) for the following duties at $5,000 per year. We can review annually so it’s not a commitment forever.
Record contacts and status changes with publishers and learned society in a spread sheet. TG to provide.
Maintain paper and electronic copies of all agreements.
Update wiki permissions documents.
Update bid list systems as needed.
Maintain some sort of tickler list.
Do occasional research for contact information.
Track email and paper correspondence.
Do it.

G. BHL usage analytics. Please refenence 28 January email from Chris.
Are you interested in getting these on a regular basis?
Who should it go to - only BHL Execs, BHL Directors or the whole BHL listserv?
Should be supplied as consistent metric about once a week. Need to see what Paddy is proposing to measure. We should wait a bit on this discussion. "total number of users per week". Google analytics are free so ok if we all use the same analytics.

H. Invitation for BHL to participate in e-Biosphere 09: The International Conference on Biodiversity Informatics will be hosted by NHM London on 1-5 June 2009:
2 conferences--3 days with 500 people and then 100 people for a strategic conference

I. Chairing of the BHL Architecture meeting
good, ambitious agenda. Graham will chair. Martin take notes? Chris or Martin can interpret diagrams.

J. OTHER

JSTOR open to providing content.

Bylaws sent out and email suggests that we pass terms and conditions and then have an election. Add election to agenda.

Foldouts--one or more jp2? how assembled for delivery? Suggested cost is $2 per foldout--but is it worth it? Connie will talk with Robert about making sure the foldout option is good before agreeing to pay $2 per foldout.

Chris, Martin and other MOBOT developers will have publication in next Code4Lib.

Connie and Nancy Gwinn's paper has been accepted for IFLA 2008.

MacArthur Foundation very enthusiastic about EOL and wanted to know benchmarks. when to expect more pages, etc. They noticed the bumpy launch!

Cathy met with Smithsonian staff about getting working group together--really want a BHL Director to think about the collections.

Cathy thinking about Doug Holland and also we discussed having it be a collaboration with Connie.

NEXT CALL: TUESDAY MARCH 11 AT 11 AM EST, 10 AM CST, 4 PM GMT