November 23, 2009 BHL Executive Committee notes

BHL Executive Committee Conference Call November 24, 2009
On call: Chris, Tom, Connie, Cathy, Martin

Cathy noted that she has asked Susie Skomal/Bioone and David Remson/GBIF to write letters for the ALCTS 2010 Outstanding Collaboration Citation Award and they have agreed. Barbara Preece will nominate us. Will be well timed with Biodiversity 2010. The staff group has pushed this idea and several have contributed much work (Diane Rielinger and Don Wheeler, to name 2).
ALA BHL meeting? Martin asked if it would be feasible. Connie noted that it can't be on the weekend if it is to be at Harvard and Jim Hanken is only available on Friday, Jan 15. Connie, Judy and Martin will review options, probably for a less formal get-together.


BHL Europe meetings: moving to a shared development path. Real Jardin Botanico in Madrid is interested in contributing to BHL--1.3 million pages of high quality scanned monographs. AnimalBase will be sharing, too. Tom suggests that we accelerate the focus on journal permissions and scanning journals. This would reduce the duplication problem since the serials tool is reasonable and functions well.


Brazil: Impetus comes from science open access publisher. Interested in digitizing technology. Feb 3,4,5 in Sao Paulo. Attendees: Martin Kalfatovic, Chris and Tom. This meeting will be followed by a major international symposium in Baelm. Smithsonian scientists will be attending the symposium.


China: Chris, Tom, Phil Cryer and Cathy are going to China but need to send information to Tom to get official invitations. Impetus from Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Arab group--meeting in February in Woods Hole but not sure if these are the same people as want to be involved in BHL.


TDWG results – Chris and Cathy: see Chris's report. Chris is a great spokesperson for BHL. Meeting with Don Hobern was great. Very energizing. Anthony and Phil did a great job presenting technical aspects and they have been invited to join a GBIF data committee as well as a datacloud group for TDWG. Richard Pyle will likely pull together the literature standards. Chris also noted that his update session was enlightening--see report. Gives direction on Citebank. Zookeys (lubomir penev) content to come into Citebank. Phil will work on this.

Cathy--GBIF. David Remson talked about BHL in Taiwan and Thailand. GBIF interested in building infrastructures in various countries. David notes that internet is not uniformly good in various countries. He thinks GBIF could work on infrastructure for BHL in countries with poor access. GBIF wants to connect with BHL and we could put our content on their node.
Graham has suggested we have a meeting with all the BHL reps and perhaps this would be a time to incorporate GBIF. Need plan and funding.
Martin update on World Digital Library. Met with John Oudermand to see if Smithsonian could participate. James Billington thought the Smithsonian could just contribute "science stuff". SI will provide some history of science items. Then maybe adding BHL materials. Very different model--everything is hosted at LC and then serve through local servers.
Chris noted that he will be in Columbia next week for Latin American Plant meeting. Anything he should bring to JSTOR? indexing metadata would be useful. Since we are an emerging host for biodiversity literature so we have something to offer.
ACTION ItemsPlan BHL Europe/BHL/ other participants grand meeting and identify funding.Chris will send out TDWG notes to BHL group.Tom will send note to group about accelerating journal permissions and serials scanning.Connie, Judy and Martin to talk about ALA BHL plan.


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