May 13,2008 BHL Executive Committee Notes

BHL Executive Committee Conference call
May 13, 2008

Fundraising: IMLS grant, BHL Europe grant, Harvard input into scanning
taxon specific fundraising should probably be in the science realm, not
the library. Graham is talking to Wellcome Trust about possible funding.
Send any funding thoughts to Tom for the report to EOL Steering Committee.

Meeting with Linda and IA--Tom and Chris

The meeting was about clarifying the scope of the Fedora Commons and TOPAZ--how to
spend the Moore funding and how it relates to BHL development.
Boundaries between the projects need to be clarified. Automated markup
issue--BHL is a subset of a larger need. Lee Giles has been studying
Open OCR by Google/Breuel. Giles wants to include this in the automated
markup proposal, which fits BHL goals.

Chris Freeland was at the Smithsonian for a week. It was highly productive.
There was a discussion about what infrastructure Smithsonian can
provide. Smithsonian IT is open to hosting BHL content. Will be doing
something with EOL site. Must have BHL image data somewhere else.
Chris met with LC (funded by Sloane to do page turning
application that is open source). Can we encourage this project?
Martin attends the planning meetings for this project and Chris calls
in.

Cathy--Wellcome Trust may be interested in the Taxon Finder tool for
Biomedicine.

Tom--For the DataNet proposal (principal PI at Johns Hopkins) there was a visit to NIH that was not
completely positive. Tom is considering a Smithsonian proposal with
George van Dyke and Jennifer Schopf.

Connie--We have a signed contract with Internet Archive!

Nancy Gwinn suggested that the Institutional Council should meet more
than once a year. Tom will put it on the agenda for the June
Institutional Council call.

BHL Staff may like to have a face-face meeting. We can
monitor on the call. Cathy's staff is putting together a demo--how to
ingest data, use Wonderfetch, best practices. We should consider
sending a few people to AMNH from MBL/Smithsonian. NYPL seems to be at
capacity although we aren't sure what this means. NYBG might have to be cut back. NYPL is running two shifts.
Need to discuss this with Robert.

IA still has a problem with pdfs. Pages get lost. This is mainly from the December/January shipment. Foldouts don't display well with pdfs.

Graham has been working on the BHL Europe submission--draft is about 38 pages.

Tom and Marie Studer are talking to AIBS Council tomorrow.

Connie gave another talk to Harvard Librarians (Science Librarians).

Next call: May 27 11 AM EST, 10 AM CST, 4 PM GMT