Minutes March 9

MINUTES MARCH 9, 2011

Back to Agenda: March+8-9%2C+2011

8:30 – 9:00 coffee, tea
9:00 – 9:15 Review of day’s agenda; Cathy Norton

9:15 – 9:45 Budget Planning review - Hibernation, Maintenance, and Growth – Tom Garnett For documents: Back to Agenda: March+8-9%2C+2011
HIBERNATION: possibility for funding of Program Director for one year through Smithsonian overhead. Program Director salary runs out in August 2011 but can continue until Aug 2012 with funding by Smithsonian.
Technical Director Moore funding ends Dec. 2010. MacArthur can fund Jan-July 2012
Collections Manager funded through summer 2012
Collections staff funded through 2013 (Seidell Foundation)
Developer staff funded through 2012 (includes ingest tasks!)
ACTION: (Connie needs to send Tom BHL staff costs).
No new services, MOBOT may not be able to host redundantly but may have other options (Europe, Bibliotheca Alexandrina). London will be hosting the data in perpetuity and will serve the data but as BHLEurope. Europe will likely continue grow. But still need failover site.
Expectation that BHL members will continue to work together and provide metadata work.Content will still be available to the world but with different interface/services.
How confident are we that Internet Archive will continue? As confident as we are that the members will continue.

MAINTENANCE: Some degree of support. Current year numbers and next year's numbers should be the same as Option A and C (correction to spreadsheet). Adds some funding for Developers and Analyst and content ingestion.

GROWTH: Continue with full suite of staff plus funding for new scanning. Chris noted that every bit of money that gets put into technical development means new apps and services.

If Tom is not the Program Director, how do the MacArthur funds get administered.
There will be no more funds from MacArthur.

UPDATE FROM BHLAUSTRALIA
Ely Wallis : new site design & code, release eta April, mapping integration, buying digitis'n rigs, recruiting staff

9:45 – 10:45 Review of and decision on “BHL Governance Proposal” Cathy Norton
Why? Most MOUs up in July 2011 so we must plan for a new one. New member applications. Long-term sustainability.

BHL Steering Committee (budgetary, membership and hiring decision: This requires financial committment), BHL Council (agree to contribute content, Working Groups, Secretariat (product management of BHL, not EOL), BHL Partners (regional projects that host the bhl corpus and share content).

What are the percs of the Steering Committee?

Are we a consortium? Are we going to become a 501(3)c? Conversion, auditing and accounting are a big cost here. This has not affected funding. Facing reduced budgets, it doesn't make sense. What are the advantages to being separate, an LLC. Allows hiring, purchasing etc. without institutional interference. If we continue as we are, will the Smithsonian/MBL/MOBOT continue managing the funds? Tom said that he used to think that an incorporated BHL might be better able to submit funds--but we have been able to get funding on behalf of BHL. It has not been an impediment to be unincorporated. In some cases, the Smithsonian can't apply for grants but others can. EOL has not incorporated--one consideration was that having a US-based financial unit might dampen global interests. This is a structure that allows more flexibility.
Frank Bisby-Catalogue of Life Reading, UK--may have insight on this.

Having Secretariat at Smithsonian makes sense because EOL is also here. Smithsonian has adapted to managing the finances. Nancy noted that the Smithsonian is happy to continue in that role and will contribute the overhead to BHL. EOL is working on federalizing and BHL may want to try this as well.

ACTION: Let Cathy Norton know by May 15 if you can provide the annual support of $10,000 for the upcoming year. Should accompany the MOU.

Membership is for institutions.

Japan is giving content to BHL but are not a node, but a partner.

What about BioOne? JSTOR? UIUC (direct contributors), CDL (ingest). They are contributors.

Help needed: Global BHL governance (Cathy, Graham, Connie), Local BHL governance (Cathy, Connie), new by-laws (Nancy), MOU (Tom)

Graham noted that Bob Corrigan could be helpful with the governance work. Erik agreed to have him help.

Tom noted that the minimal requirements to be a global certified member need to be defined with careful though and will require work.

Bibliotheca Alexandrina will be doing major work. But we need to define the minimal expectations before we start working with the next group.

BHL was asked to define global minimal requirements and submit. Nancy noted that travel should be paid for any of us to travel there. Tom noted that this shouldn't be a requirement but situational. Nancy said that the document should state that there may be costs for support. "Consultation costs may be expected from the node requesting consult" or something. Not required but possible. Might want to insert language that encourages coordination of funding requests. Graham noted that most foundations operate from US and so there should be little overlap.
Martin passed out Smithsonian's quarterly report.
10:45 – 11:00 coffee, tea
11:00 – 12:15 Future Scenarios for BHL; What commitments are realistic - all.

The sky's the limit for visions of the future! Tom B has some ideas of how to work together differently. How about BHL as an entity to negotiate with publishers? Smithsonian is not allowed to be in consortial arrangements. Cathy suggests that we look at staff and buy and manage serials and books collectively. One centralized group might save a lot of money. This is totally in the digital content. Could facilitate print plus.
What is the title overlap among BHL institutions?
If botanical code changes and citebank becomes the trusted repository, this will have an impact. This requires that BHL can demonstrate sustainability.

Nancy: BHL open and free and Citebank becomes a subscription model? Tom G. noted that a significant set of content in Citebank is supported by MacArthur/Sloane and the contract states open access. The costs of developing and administering a business can be quite high.
Can add banner ad to accept donations. EOL got some money with their ads.

Chris Mills noted that if all the institutions that are concerned with making BHL a trusted repository...we could at least enter hibernation or maintenance mode.

ACTION: Chris F. Martin and Doug should set up the "donate button"/ banner ad.

12:15 – 1:15 Lunch

1:15 – 1:30 New Member application – Cornell University Connie Rinaldo
CULibraryOrgChart_6-2.pdf

Cornell BHL Application packet-3.doc

Connie reviewed the history--Cornell requested membership last year.

Are we ready to add a new member?
What do we expect from Cornell?
Cathy asked: Should we have a development/ingest fee? Tom argues against this because it is a bit random.
Does Cornell have collections we want? How do they fit our collection policy? Boutique scans is "upload on your own". There are many operational issues for Cornell and for all of us. They approached us about membership.

Nancy asked--do we have a consensus on governance model? Yes we do. Unanimous. Nancy suggest we find a synonym for "member" or use it only for those who pays.
Global partners, member institutions, contributors. Members are the only ones who vote.

Need to share our new governance with Cornell and see what level they want to participate. We need to think through what it means to join the BHL.

Do we need a joining fee?

We have not received any content from BHLEurope yet. Getting content shared is rare at this point so sharing is a big deal and we should care about this. On the other hand, if some institution wants to provide content, we have to be sure we are not draining our resources.

Should the Institutional Council ask Cornell to join? Yes, unanimous.

ACTION: Tom will approach Cornell and share the new membership levels.


1:30 – 2:30 Fund raising – round robin
BHL has collectively brought in about $10 million-about doubling our grant!
Banner ad (reviewed earlier)
Grants singly or collectively
We need to stay healthy and energized as an organization.
Chris F. and Martin have contacted NEH and they are interested in BHL. Develop a way to identify illustrations in the collections--code to find, tag and label, send them to flickr and then putting info about files into IA for greater access. May 19 preservation, access and development grants 350,000 over 3 years. Will aid EOL's harvesting of the data. Should work as a group--Smithsonian, Harvard, Cathy, NYBG, AMNH expressed interest in being part of this. Can hold in EOL flickr, bhl flickr, bhl image database. Can we get funds for digitizing special collections? possibly but need a lot of money for technical development. Match is about 20%. OpenUp is a potential for taking content (overseas).
MOBOT taking the lead.
Might be able to do an out of cycle request for support for digital humanities invitees to come to Life and Literature.
Possible partnerships in Germany with grants there. Bees and their cultural impact--for scanning. Jan 2012
Moore Foundation might be interested in governance projects around global bhl. Not for scaning.
IMLS
Tom is researching funds for bringing some Chinese and African participants for Life and Literature.
Bryan Heidorn--biodiversity informatics competition (NSF grant with Smithsonian but not funded.). Assemble panel of computer scientists and one of biology scientists. Identify problems. Have a refereed competition for coding solutions to problems using BHL corpus. Geographic tools and name finding tools might be useful. Net results? Might get some new services or maybe nothing. Panels are posers of the questions and judges. Resubmit? Jesse Ausobel would be interested, too. Original budget was around 500,000 for 2 years. It would be great to have BHL be a huge data mine for computer scientists to work with.
ACTION: Tom G. will share the original proposal with Erik and this will help EOL, and engage computer scientists.
There is an NSF already submitted but not yet turned down. Chris noted that this would add specialist bibliographies and allow users to upload pdfs thereby extending Citebank. 295,000 for MOBOT over 2 years.
Graham noted that he has been encouraged to make business cases for digitization. Is it easy to pull out digitization projects by species or geography. Can we model using Cal Digital Library (more random) to identify blocks of projects for digitization? Can we sort BHL in a way to do this? Ingest of CDL was focused.
We need money for scanning--how do we get money for scanning? CLIR? Hidden collections/special collections. Money for scanning needs to have a theme. We need to identify thematically interesting projects (gates and parasites/insects, desertification). Cathy noted that we need to know what is in our collections that should be digitized. Early bibliographies (medicinal plants).
Work with Medical Heritage Library? Connie will contact Maura Marx.
democratizing information, ethnology, providing the literature for the research base
Focus on the literature repatriation aspect of BHL--everything that has to do with species in Africa, for instance.
JRS does biodiversity informatics/software development. MOBOT had a couple of proposals rejected.
Index Animalium and TL2 projects may give us more information about thematic digitization and size of projects.
Encyclopedia of Earth --focused on global problems. Maybe the big issues identified could be paired with BHL topics.
We need to monitor Digital Public Library of America--funders meeting pulled together by Sloane Foundation. Possibly may fund digitization. Chris noted that we should stand up and say we are the science library for the Digital Public Library of America. We have the model worked out overlaid with tools that work.
Judy asked if there are opportunities to do follow up to Darwin Library.
Florence Gould foundation encourages French/English collaborations.
Google has digitized a lot of biodiversity information, some that we don't have. Can we get Google to help us? Give them species names? Ask Google for content they have already scanned that is biodiversity. Approach Hathi trust?

ATOS email to Graham--would consider developing applications to deliver value-added services using BHL data. Some free, some charged with revenue-sharing model.

We need to find other sources of funding. Foundations, grants Check the credits on Nature shows. Arcadia Foundation on hiatus.
Check with your institution's grant offices to find grant opportunities.
If BHL is a vision for the future of our natural history and botanical libraries then when does BHL become the library for all of us. How do we get a small amount from those that have not contributed. When Google releases the 12 mill items, then libraries are in trouble. This is a conversation that requires Museum Directors or Institutional Library Directors.
Is open access sustainable without outside funding? We have fullfilled the open access model, now do we need to require subscription?
Erik comments about EOL: Activities need to be part of the mainstream of the institution and partners take care of their own work. In EOL's case they are looking at federalizing.
Need to keep BHL going for 5 years at least.

2:30 – 2:45 coffee, tea
2:45 – 3:15 Wrap Up, assignments, next steps.
Banner-Chris, Martin, Tom B.
By-laws-Nancy
Global & local governance--Graham, Connie Cathy
Publicity-- Tom B, Susan, Nancy
Tom --G-MOU and corporate reporting, call Cornell and explain new categories of participation.
Send to Cathy by May 18 how we will participate in new structure.