Minutes March 8

MINUTES MARCH 8, 2011 INSTITUTIONAL COUNCIL MEETING

Back to Agenda

8:30 – 9:00 coffee, tea
9:00 – 9:15 Welcome, review of agenda; introductions – Cathy Norton
Cathy Norton, Graham HIgley, Nancy Gwinn, Jean Farrington, Tom Baione, Susan Fraser, Martin Kalfatovic, Bianca Crowley, Christine Giannoni, Doug Holland, Chirs Freeland, Tom Garnett, Christopher Mills, Cathy Wilt, Judy Warnement, Jane Smith, Erik Matta

Agenda on wiki. Live minutes on wiki.
BHL must be sustainable and vibrant. Requires a great deal of thinking and vision.

9:15 – 9:45 Review of funding, status, milestones. – Tom Garnett
BHL began with $0. Planning discussions about digitizing biodiv literature. Sloane Found funded a conference in 2005 (Library and Laboratory). Prioity to digitzed the literature. Began looking for funding. EOL went into high gear and immediate synergy--BHL became a component of EOL and received money through MacArthur Foundation. Funding expended by July 2012. 3+ million spent on salaries (Tom, Bianca, some Chris), meetings, scanning & digitization, technical developments from MOBOT.
Martin and Nancy raised 1.7 mill from Seidel endowment (digitization), Chris raised about $2 mill through grants (Moore--technical and global BHL), IMLS funding ($600,000), NYBG-Mellon for digitization (more than $1 mill), Lounsbery Found grants (nearly 200,000), IMLS planning grant to Harvard (40,000); MCZ contributed 1.25 mill to scanning and digitization. Plus spawned global partner projects: BHL Europe 3.4 mill euros (software devel and coordinating digital materials), BHL China (digitiztion of unique materials), Arab lang BHL ( Mirror site, Biblio. Alexandrina), BHL South Amer (Scielo), BHL Australia
Infrastructure for true digital collaboration.
Reviewed Appendix A in 2009 BHL Strategic plan. files/BHL+Strategic+Plan+draft+04-02-09+.doc

33 mill pages in portal, permissions obtained for about 127 titles for current publications, preservation infrastructure, added new members, become well-known in a various venues: biology community,digital library community, collaborative science endeavors: We are an interesting guinea pig and attract technical problem solving.

This is like setting up a graduate level botanical/zoological library--deep research space for developing countries. Not done! But have made a difference. Compendium for data mining: especially taxonomic names. Additional and improved data mining allows others to do research projects. *Improved access to biodiversity literature, even in North America.*

New and unexplored uses for the data (artists, eg.) Digital artists doing mashups--not just natural history artists. Historical reenactors, historians documenting age of exploration.

EOL has references to BHL: 980,000 species pages with links to BHL. Quite a few have no other information than name and link to BHL.

Links with GBIF, BioStor, JSTOR: other projects see the usefulness of BHL. BHL's open architechture makes this very easy thanks to Chris and his tech team. JSTOR plant sciences links out to BHL like EOL does. Wikipedia and BHL--bounce rate is high. Need more and better linking. Need to automate this, too. Wikimedia connection and EOL--not formal but are considering them for membership. The book of the week might be a feed to wikipedia.

Almost 10 mill spent on digitizing literature for audience of 10,000? How do we broaden the audience?

Need more PR. More this afternoon. Expanding the audience!

Erik noted that Wikmedia/Jesse Aussobel are looking at partnership and possible position support for Wikimedia for better links with EOL (and potentially BHL) There are unpaid wikimedia reps everywhere. Look for one in Boston.

9:45 – 10:30 Encyclopedia of Life plans Erick Mata, Executive Director, EOL Development: Keynote slide show. Awareness and Understanding of Living Nature
EOL Presentation for BHL IC.ppt
new EOL platform by Aug 2011

EOL new global partners: CONABIO (Mexico--Mexican EOL), INBio (Central American EOL, textbook for students), Kenya, East Africa? Argentina is moving fast and interested in EOL.

Tom asked about contacts, conversations in India, Indonesia, southeast asia. Erik--not really. Graham noted that there is some contact with India. Judy noted that Kamal Bawa may be a good partner (ATREE) India has been intermittently involved in GBIF.

Tom noted that Internet Archive is looking for places to put unused scribes (due to US budget cuts). Needs a small amount of seed money. Possibility to pursure. Tom also noted that we have ongoing connections with Japan--regarding loading Japanese Zoological Society literature.

463,000 EOL pages with text or image content, 683,000 with references only, 1.6 mill with a name only

Need to have visitors visit more pages and return more often. Must keep data robust.

Has been US centric but more and more global involvement but not full integration.

EOL version 2: delight the user, internationalization, field guide generation, community engagement, search and discovery

improve curator tools, open source development, cloud computing, internationalization, better handling of names, better macroscopic analysis, crowd sourcing, improve literature
EOL partners (open group)---eol council (33 members, annual meeting) ---exec committee (13 members, 4 meetings a year)--EOL secretariat and then multiple working groups (long: e.g. education or short term: e.g translation?)

Sustainability: must go beyond money: excellent data quality and functionality, network of committed institutions, flexible and efficient administration, continuous funding

Mainstream EOL related activities into cornerstone institutions; promote and support regional and thematic EOL's.

BHL has demonstrated that digitization can be incorporated into regular workflow.

10: 30 – 10:45 coffee, tea
10:45 – 12:30 Development Road Map - Chris Freeland
revised launch page but most funds spent in back end. UI needs work but an opportunity for funding.
Chris uploaded 1500 search terms from google to BHL that could be used for wikipedia. Back to Agenda
3500 users a day. Referral sites: eol at top. More than 38% of traffic from Google.
Darwin's Library--with annotations --a collaboration now in BHL but not yet live.

Development priorities in document is work promised to do or doing for MacArthur funding only. There are other activities.

1. DOI: Smithsonian has become a member and BHL will ride on coattails. Will enable the ability to reference BHL just like an article in Science. Graham noted that BHLEurope is installing a DOI minter going to the page level. DOIs assigned through Smithsonian will be assigned by Crossref. BHLEurope is assigning--so a bit different. Crossref DOIs provide metadata and information. Cathy N. noted that Cross ref DOIs are assigned to data sets in repository for citing. It costs more to assign crossref DOIs--Smithsonian paying annual fee and then $0.10-$0.15 per DOI. Publishers use Cross ref as prepub DOI grabber.

2. CLUSTER

3. CITEBANK
Launched Dec 2010; current stats: 22,000 articles from BHL articlizing. (60,000 generated; 22,000 with article-level info). Indexed and pdfs available, more than 6000 articles from SciELO, 300 from Zookeys, 1200 from Smithsonian. Where an OAI repository can be identified, it is easy content. Built in= identify content and automated update (SciELO, Zookeys, DSpace repositories). Criteria of selection is institution-based at the moment. All citations are actionable at this point.
Bulk upload means we can essentially provide a publishing platform.
Outstanding review for NSF grant (MOBOT portion= 295,000 for 2 years) to "add specialist bibliographies" 3.2 These are citations that may not have a link which is different.
Chris noted that Rod Page's BioStor may actually be our Citebank. Rod Page has remained interested in BHL for a long time!
Safe Harbor model exists but may expose our larger institutions to lawsuits. Getting there is outside MacArthur funding and brings on legal issues. Working on crowd-sourcing copyright research (pilot project).

4. NAME FINDING
Fall global tech meeting resulted in need to write a problem statement and have others work on this.
IMPACT will be a commercial product.

Chris asked: What is the role of BHL in world of nomenclators, etc. For instance Tropicos--600,000 links into BHL for protologs. BHL has no opinion--just providing literature and page links. Taxonomic opinions are not for BHL to record but should be responsibility of EOL and others.

5. BHL PORTAL ENHANCEMENTS
return BHL value-added info (metadat etc.) to Internet Archive file system
Articlizing is cool new user engagement: creating objects that can be used by scientists.

6. TEXT CORRECTION
Bears investigation but very big in Europe and Australia. *Important but outside the scope of our funding to resolve.* Tom noted that this is such a big problem that there are many other efforts working on this so we need to monitor and adapt, rather than create.
Cathy noted that Bank of America needs this--what do they use? Data is more homogeneous.Graham noted that IBM center in Southampton has a team working on this but a year ago were not getting very far. Worth checking again. And we just aren't in their league. Google is probably working on this too.

7. CONTENT ACQUISITION
This is what it is all about! Liberated our stacks. People come to BHL for content primarily, not services. Darwin Library--Graham noted that what Chris's team has done is unique. Who will write it up? Chris noted that AMNH, MOBOT etc. will have press releases. Cathy noted there should be a note in Science/Nature.
Funding should be going into scanning. We have to keep doing this. Tom noted that with the infrastructure we have, $1 buys a lot!
Hooking in OAI feeds provides lots for little input.

8. SUSTAINABILITY

Replication of BHL app, database, not just content: good for global redundancy! If we end up with no funding, must identify how to keep static app in last 2 months of funding.

Should the priorities be reordered? Content acquisition should be moved higher. Graham noted that there are enough resources to complete what is here.
Susan asked if we are synching back from other projects--working on it. Tom noted that the level of international REAL sharing is somewhat unprecedented. Many negotiations are still under way. Dutch, Hungarian, etc being loaded into London operation. Then will be sent to BHL. Material published within 28 institutions will likely be available. Chris noted that the volume of digitization is much lower in other partners.

Will vote on whole document priorities as printed. *Motion carried unanimously to accept document priorities.*

OTHER FUNDED PROJECTS
TL2 work described by Martin. $200,000 for small number of volumes
Fedora: will continue to integrate (NLM using Fedora for preservation).
Life and Literature conference: back end support
Darwin's Library
Global BHL: instantiate other repository nodes (Europe, Asia, Australia, South America-SciELO, Africa-Bibliotheca Alexandrina)
BHLAustralia: Content/synch, portal
BHLChina: Content/synch, scanning and metadata improvement
BHLEurope: Content/synch, portal

From all of us to Chris and his tech team: Job Well Done!!

12:30 – 1:30 pm Lunch
1:30 - 2:30 Global BHL reports – Graham Higley, Chris Freeland, Martin Kalfatovic, Connie
Martin's presentation: Movie in Chinese
Movie in English
Graham: BHLEurope deliverables: German prototype ready in April, GRIB ready for prime time in April; European data being uploaded into GRIB then next year Australia. Chinese may not. Strategic changes: technologically, the closest to BHL Europe is Bibliotheca Alexandrina and will deliver components for BHLEurope (DOI minter for instance). Internet connection was problematic for a few days so looking to get Egypt connected to high bandwith secure alternative already used in other countries. Integration with Egypt fits with sustainablility--Berlin is committed to act as coordinator (libraries/content providers) and NHM is committed to maintaining long-term access to data. Will probably get global BHL to the 150 mill pages. EDIT project has had a thread of work about publishing in Nat. Hist institutions: outcomes= will set a date for institutions to stop exchanges--this will be a planned process. 109 journal titles. This is a removal of mailing paper, electronic can still be exchanged. Also will be publishing a descriptive taxonomic journal for Europe and incorporating some of the smaller titles. Funding by a variety of European institutions/countries an open access free to pubish journal: European Journal of Descriptive Taxonomy. Free to use and free to publish. This will be supported by the changes in exchanges. Graham will send a list of the 109 journals that will no longer be exchanged.

Connie:
Best Practices document:

Chris: Funding by Moore Foundation has facilitated social global side. Not building a google for the world but sharing our content across political boundaries. Keep social relationships going and these facilitate collaboration. The loose organic nodes have prevented a hierarchy that would paralyze progress.

The most important thing we are doing is scanning the books....Chris

2:30 – 3:00 Global BHL Governance Principles Cathy Norton, Graham Higley
Cathy reviewed the vision and operational framework document. Back to Agenda open access, collaboration, decentralization, Interoperability, transparency. Each node/global is independent but interoperable.
Graham: Key to approach--a light touch enables us to get things done. More formal structures may impede progress. Power and funding relationships are very variable. Must be respectful of where the partners come from in this variable structure. Clarity of vision, simple documents, light touch
Remove include/exclude language

Chris asks: What is our name? BHLUS, BHL Classic; How about just BHL? And then global BHL. Not branding--that's a different issue.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library, original, will be BHL. Global BHL will be gBHL.
ACTION ITEM: who, what next steps.
All agree to statement with elimination of "include/exclude" language.

3:00 – 3:30 Status Report Life and Literature Conference Planning TG, MK: Proposal is on conference site.
Tom: Lounsbery Foundation funded proposal to plan and implement the Life and Literature conference. Open to public, high profile. Logistics through Field Museum and in Chicago. Program Committee and Onsite Committee. November 14, 15 2011 in Chicago. Plenary sessions-2 and parallel tracks. 90-200 participants. Small charge with some scholarships and subventions. Tracks: Biodiversity Science/Informatics, Publishing and Scholarly Communication and relationship to Biodiversity; Large scale digital library projects; Biodiversity Literature and the Humanities or other ways to use BHL. Also breakouts formulating key questions about the future of BHL, possibly leading to funding requests. Similar to Lib/Lab, want to come out with a new vision on where to go from here. BHL for the future.

2 plenary speakers--one biodiversity oriented (Rich Pyle??) and one to be determined from a wider context (Stuart Brand?). We need someone who brings issues that we haven't thought of.
Nancy asked Should we include education? Tom suggested we might be able to fold into 4th track. Using EOL as textbook (comment by Erik Matta).
Add something explicit about education to incorporate citizen scientists. Learning is an important funding source in Europe. Need the hook to tap into these funds.

Nancy asked about the large-scale digital library track--. Tom noted that this is a good marketing tool and having this component puts us into this possible funding stream. Martin noted that this really addresses meta-issues like preservation.

Should be integrating biology. And what we need to get out of this conference is "What do users want"?

Sally Schuler--biology education.

This is very scientific literature but this is being incorporated into various teaching and learning environments.

Biodiversity/Biology, humanites, learning education, publisher (add digital libraries?): when does a repository become a digital library?

Repository/archive of choice should be BHL! Tom's long-term goal.

Education is a big market. The conference is not an ask. We need to identify the future and demonstrate the input and priorities: a white paper that can be turned into a final report and funding approaches.

Judy suggested perhaps we can use big digital library names as panel moderators (John Palfrey?)

Publisher panel has Mendeley, PLoS, BioOne, Zookeys and waiting to hear about BMC.

Tracks defined by end of April with track leaders to expand.

3:30 – 3:45 Coffee, tea
3:45 – 4:45 Publicity Status and problems; review of BHL Brochure, etc
Publicity and marketing.
Martin: use of social media: Bianca, Grace, John M., ramped up twitter (more than 500 followers), bhl blog, facebook (more than 800 fans), book of the week, page of the day
If you tweet/facebook then share bhl related tweets

BHL Brochure--Tom passed out a layout. Nancy noted that this has multiple purposes: lay, targetted and funder audiences. Needs work-- but a start. Less text, more pics. "Emphasis should be on what can BHL do for me?"
Do we need the member list?
Graham suggested each institution might like to have themselves as a contact: *Tailor for local usage.*

Chris Mills: Need a simple message, BHL is full of many useful things, save time, find what you want.

Brochure, poster, postcards.

Chris F. noted we need to think about sustainability--ink, paper, number of copies;
make files available; Flexibility is key.
Tom will get hard estimates when design is finalized

Use same typefaces to ensure recognition.

Does this satisfy those with publicity needs? This is a good start on the elevator speech. Less is more. Yes for Graham, This is a start for NYBG.
Tom would like more specifics for what information is necessary for talking with the administration--part of the business plan. Tom B.--we need a cv for BHL.

Graham noted that we need 2 sets of content: 1) quarterly report like content or project to date and 2) Numbers on digitization costs We need to have the same information for all of us.

To develop: 1)Brochure 2)postcards 3)director generated report with how much does it cost and how much has been spent for you? ie how much have you saved for your institution while providing better service? Space gained, staff retraining, leaders in the field

When we reach 100,000 volumes, focus on milestone. 35 million page milestone. Story for Wired? New Yorker? Smithsonian? Buy Google or Facebook ads? Dancing with the Stars? Survivor? Top Chef?

Is there more we can do with conferences? NSTA (national science teachers) EOL goes. HIgh school biology teachers association, Marine Science teachers association.

LOGOS: CR report: Info sent Feb 8,2011 to global partners: To refresh our (collective) memory, I will recap some notes from the Fall 2010 Global Tech meeting in Woods Hole. At this meeting, many of us sat together and discussed the development of a Global BHL logo. The basic design guidelines established were to develop a logo that is a graphic treatment that does not imply any script but have a design space where a script can be added, if desired. The added script could be vertical or horizontal and have left or right characters. Colors should not clash. The concept should be something that reflects the BHL-- I have attached a draft document that outlines global BHL principles as a refresher. Local and regional logos could harmonize with the global logo, but may need to reflect relationships to funding or parent institutions--these would be local decisions.

Individual projects may have their own logos; but we would like to present a universal option that everyone can use and adapt locally if desired.

The global BHL will have a recognizable symbol that can be displayed along with local logo choices. The aim is to make the logo simple, recognizable and easily adaptable to local needs. Relatively easy to articulate, not so easy to implement.

How to implement the global BHL logo? Regional contests within BHL? Have our local graphic designers review the BHL principles and come up with 2-3 possibilities from which this group could select 4 or 5 candidates for review by the global coordinating committee (as depicted in the attached draft governance illustration) or some other body representative of the Global BHL?

Time sensitive question is with the existing logo. Can use existing logo, draft new quick logo, or have no logo. Agreement to go without a logo on brochure.

Poster contest, logo contest

4:45 – 5:00 Wrap Up, Summary, agenda tweaking, assignments

Wrap up: BHL has secured over 10 million dollars over the years. This is outstanding.
EOL v.2--save, use, understand (take notice for BHL message). Important collaboration.
Content is still king. Citebank good. Access to biodiversity literature.
The global BHL is happening and we have contributed strongly.
Publicity. Nancy, make it happen? Committee to get brochure into concise, clear, beautiful, what does it do for me? Nancy, Susan, Jean, Tom B.
Connie will continue to beat her head against the wall regarding logos. Is this a priority for fund expenditure? Tom will review the funds available. Graham noted that we can possibly live with a logo we don't like as it isn't a priority. Jean noted that we can defer until we know what the funding situation is post 2012.

ACTION: Tom will work on reporting document to provide to administrators.
Drinks, dinner at Oyamel http://www.oyamel.com/