November 21, 2007 BHL Executive Committee Notes

BHL Executive Committee Minutes, November 21, 2007

*Next BHL Director's meeting--schedule for March. One day only and directors only. Focus on major management issues. Boston is best for Graham. Connie will check on availability of Agassiz Room. Tom will draft an agenda.

*EOL is meeting at the end of Feb. at the same time as Architecture meeting which may be in DC. Architecture meeting needs some input about attendance from other directors. Tom will send some wording for other directors. Needs to be a small group that Chris can work with. Chris is working on an agenda for the meeting with help from Thorny Staples.

***Moore Foundation: Jim Omura said they have decided to make award for FEDORA migration for BHL portal. Moore is also interested in
funding automated markup. They may fund a small workshop in first quarter of 2008 at Moore foundation to develop proposal--semantic and structural. Don't need to wait for Math folks. Tom will send an informal proposal to Moore foundation for this workshop on Friday. IA also got some Moore funding. IA will be a testbed for automated markup. At this workshop, someone who has done some natural language programming from the medical community should participate (Neil Sarkar?). Tom will contact him.

*Chris was in a meeting with Anna Weitzman, Neil Thomsen, Donat Agosti. Lots of discussion. Brief vocabulary for taxonomic
citations. Will develop a white paper for taxonomic solutions. Looking for more Moore funding/workshop. Results on TDWG wiki.

*Other grant proposals: in progress

*Internet Archive was hacked into recently. We need to be sure that communication is effective. What is their disaster recovery
plan? Chris notified us. No data loss that we know of. Of concern is that the scanning workstations were down and this is inefficient
and costly. If there is no separate data loader, then can't scan. Should be some kind of buffering to enable streaming even overnight. Tom will draft a note regarding communication.

*Darwin's anniversary and Darwin project--lots going on especially in England/NHM.

*Communication about projects among the BHL directors would be helpful. Tom will send a reminder to us all to share as much as
possible.

*Jim Edwards and Tom visited Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. Interested in joining BHL and EOL. The director is
exploring funding sources so that they can fully participate. Tom will work with library director and Gary Rosenberg (her boss) and
they will draft an application (nature of the library, funding sources, staff etc) for BHL directors to review. This will help us
develop a process.

*Chris conversations with Rich Pyle: markup with David Remson on Systema Naturae. These may go in BHL. Rich is publishing a new species. Sent his list of lit cited and wants to know how much monographic works can be scanned by BHL--pre 1923 is ok. He wants to approach publishers for permission to scan in BHL. He also wants to scan articles and we are not really set up for this yet. Some have already been scanned but have to find it. Can also make some fair use "copies" to support this work. Rich's sample will be part of the EOL. Must be done for Jan 1, 2008. How do we represent just the articles? Many of the articles are electronic and available elsewhere. In the long run we must supply direct article-level accessin the BHL. We can link to institutional repositories or commercial databases. We have to be careful about what people are going to expect. Expectations are increasing fast! (Zoobank is running out of money and BHL is not planning to take this on).

*We have to clearly articulate and prioritize what BHL will do. Some of this will happen at Architecture meeting.

*Chris talked with Patrick about names indexing and what EOL wants to get from BHL. 750,000 pages indexed in last week from Botanicus. 6.8 mill taxon strings with 4.2 mill verified by taxon finder. 156,000 known only from one instance in literature. Chris is writing this up in a blog for distribution:

http://biodiversitylibrary.blogspot.com/2007/11/discovered-bibliographies-through.html

Names indexing should be ready along with IA ingest by Feb EOL launch. Some gaps in IA OAI software--in inquiry and discovery.

*Copyright and IPR statements from IA. Bernard provided information to IA but they didn't get to it right away. We have what
we need to move forward.

*Open Library has been threatened with legal action from OCLC. BHL content is showing up in Open Library. Can't count on Open Library solving anything for us. "one page on each book" with everything about the book.

*Metadata language for contract language. Should be appropriate and thought we had verbal agreement.

*Next call: Thursday November 29, 2007 at 11 am EST.