November 23, 2010 BHL Executive Committee notes

BHL Executive Committee Conference call 23 Nov 2010
on call: Tom Garnett, Chris Freeland, Martin Kalfatovic, Cathy Norton, Connie Rinaldo

A. Linz meeting (Connie): Attendees: Michael Malicky LANDOE, Fritz Gusenleitner LANDOE, Michaela Hierschläger LANDOE. Melita Birthälmer MfN, Dennis Zilke UBER, Tom Gilissen Naturalis, Jane Smith NHM, Connie Rinaldo, László Peregovits Hungary Natural History Museum

I have added notes regarding what I learned in Linz about the BHL Europe best practices guide to the questions Grace, Bianca, Tom, Suzanne and I prepared before I left for Linz. I have info from the BHL wiki to the Best Practices guide but in the end, Melita will be editing everything to ensure it has the BHL Europe flavor. We will have an opportunity to review it and whoever is in London should get a summary of the Linz meeting, too. The minutes of this meeting on the wiki are fraught with misunderstandings. I am going to try and correct what I can but what I have added to the BP guide corrects most of the communications that got garbled for my comments.
Some interesting items that I would like to know more about--apparently the Italians are working with google and want higher quality and color scans and BNF is thinking about rescanning for color and quality. Anyone know anything about this? So it seems that our decisions to not actively accept google scans is congruent with BHLEurope partner thinking.

UA=Upper Austria; LANDOE is the LandesMuseen, the collections and public end for natural history for the SchlossMuseen. I can't pretend i understand the structure. This is one of the museums of Upper Austria and Michael Malicky described himself as the head of IT for the museums of Upper Austria, unless I misunderstood.

Responding to our questions/concerns:

1. Nudging for processes that integrate with us: *They are definitely interested in this.*
2. Scanning workflow tools-- *Saw GOOBI http://www.intranda.com/goobi used by Francisco's group, and it seems like a good workflow tool. It is open source but there is a company involved--intranda software. I have a brochure. Michael Malicky talked about the Upper Austria workflow. They scan volumes and "dismantle them to articles" so in the museum database there are links to articles. You can view some of the work here: http://www.zobodat.at/ Choose publikationen. Michael starts by adding metadata for the publications (including current ones) of interest and then contacts publishers to show what they have already done and ask to digitize all materials. Small societies and museums seem to be positive but not commercial publishers. They are very interested in coordination and I made sure they had the link to our permissions work. (BASIC UA workflow: Add metadata about volumes, Scan, student QA, send to Innsbruck for OCR, QA (paid services), split volumes into chapters/articles (manual) including adding this metadat, integrate into web page).*
3. what we have in common: desire to get the scanning done and shared. Quite a lot, really.
4. id lit/ deduplication: they are doing most of this by hand. they search BHL before committing to scanning; in Upper Austria, everything is costed out first because of funding limitations. Currently have 700,000 pages done (about 3500 volumes)
5. data that can be shared---scans and metadata need to be sure DOCUMENT;Intellectual property issues;Document what can be used and repurposed: push for open access of metadata and underlying content;Strongly suggest a POLICY section to at least document who will and will not share; Open access and reuse; BHL is open access and all materials can be reused without permission. : they were amazed that we are concerned about this....but should be putting some info in the best practices document to ensure that the intent is there. This may not be the decision-making group, though, for policies.
6. What is considered in scope: They have similar collections issues to ours (anthropology??). But they also are trying to do full runs of serials even if the content is mixed. Scope for UA: all natural history pubs within Austria that have not yet been done."
7. DeAccessions? collection management: This was a new topic for them. Definitely interested in our work here. Added a "curation and collection management section" to document.
8. OCLC BHL synchronization (section 4.4.1) This is important in libraryland. Think about integrating bhl metadata into the biggest repos we can find (cat and resource discovery=OCLC...integrated into north american and some european libraries. Does Europeana do the same);Can we take whatever you scan and send to OCLC? No one expressed any issues here but not sure how active they will be.
9. Will the content that goes into GRIB be reflected in OCLC? if not, why not? This is a question we should continue to ask. There was not a lot of GRIB knowledge(??) here.
10. Are we going to ingest BHLEurope into BHL? Again this group didn't think this is a problem. Not the right group, though....
11. Want to have bhl and bhleurope content replicated and served in both europe and NA (if not, we can't use taxonomic services....) see #10. They are working on their own taxonomic services--or at least authority files. Again, this wasn't the right group to answer this question although they definitely understood it.
12. lateral communication sales talk---how much lateral comm. occurs among different libraries?best practice for scanning workflow and communication. They have lateral conference calls and seem to be comfortable that they are doing this.
13. Implementation of a gemini-like (issue-tracking) communications system? Interested but not entranced by this (and I pushed it, how unlike me....). They are considering some kind of issue-tracking but I think they have some interest in this being part of the GRIB.
14. Permissions issues: work to get a sense of how to collaborate between europe and classic--some european societies coming to us
We have a permissions process that is working well--handling and tracking (more than 100). Most of the time these things get scanned quickly (US< SA< EUROPE...publishers). Our content goes into bhl and then into bhl-europe. It isn't clear that if they scan that BHL would get it. See #2
15. What is the best practice for bhl-europe with regard to other partners. The best practices document is supposed to make it possible for a new partner to figure out how to participate and provide options and examples so they can pick and choose the most suitable path to success. I think.

B. China visit: Martin's report:

1. IA has pretty much set up the Scribe and left IB/CAS on there own since then. IB/CAS is not paying anything for the Scribe. Keri worked with them to get the process on track but they do not generate a MARC record which poses challenges getting into IA. They have MARC but IA Zfetch is not grabbing the MARC records. Need a collection group to discuss Chinese materials--should they come into portal directly? They have 46 books (transliterated title search or by characters) to bring in but will not have all metadata. Have not yet developed a workflow for foldouts. Keri will follow up. There is no OCR so can't search by taxonomic name. Chris noted that Tesseract (open source OCR) has just released Chinese version. But latin names can be processed as English language and extract names through OCR. Then run through Chinese language OCR. IA is blocked in China so while the BHL portal comes through, can't view images.
2. IB/CAS does not have any large supply of either already scanned materials or PDFs at the article level. The scan of the Flora of China are for a project where there are allowed to display the content only at the description/page level. The content remains under copyright and cannot under the current agreement go into BHL. They have a few article level items, but not in any quantity.
3. IB/CAS relies on the larger CAS IT infrastructure. They do not have access to either large amounts of storage or bandwidth. They get about 100 TB of space for "free" above that they have to pay. They also have costs related to bandwidth that they use (so large scale downloads of BHL content for initial seeeding or regular updates need to be carefully thought out).
4. Though Fenghong Liu does supervise the library, there is not a lot of buy-in from the two library staff members for the BHL project. Cataloging is problematic in many cases and there is no staff.
5. There is a high level of enthusiasm on the part of Fenghong, Xu, and Cui. They are eager to work on the project with, what appear to be significantly fewer resources than previously thought.

Connie mentioned a visitor from the National Library of China: Dr. Xueqin Wang, who was a visiting researcher at MIT until October.
Cathy noted that using the server in WH might solve some of the "transmission" problems that occasionally happen in china.

C. BHL-Europe: Meeting in London next week.

D. Lounsbery--Jesse wants a draft proposal Dec 13 for big external audience conference--Literature and Life. Timing is fall 2011. Setting the framework for the next 4-5 years of BHL--leveraging funding. Possibly plan in London? How far do we want to push it? Who should come? Keynote speakers out of our normal framework? Carl Zimmer? Need to get the users to come and say what they need. Gemini contains several hundred individual users. What can you do with BHL challenge? Bring the best to the meeting fully paid to the conference. ACTION: Tom to finalize proposal by Dec. 13. Send suggestions.

E. Need an informational page for the "Global BHL". This can happen once the global bhl structure has been defined (based on Tom's documents). This would present partner projects and web addresses. ACTION: for 2011 develop Global BHL page.

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