October 29, 2007 BHL Executive Committee Notes

BHL Minutes – October 29, 2007

1. Architecture meeting
Big ideas and how to implement: should someone from TDWG be included? Neil? Roger?

Anna formed a TDWG interest group for literature standards and how used across all literature, in St. Louis.

Need a technical body to advise Tom; need a mechanism: process group such that all processes get delivered

Doing systems development--need priorities

Have a timeline--iterative process, constant reorganizing depending on funding; have dependencies out of our control since we are not building everything ourselves.

Timeline not prioritized; list of requirements but not prioritized; need an approved list of BHL must do A, B C and C is more important than A and use cases. Do we need this in advance of architecture meeting--this meeting will help us identify these priorities. Chris will put together a list of what we need and use cases that can be ranked later.

Moving from current platform to Fedora next year (2009); 1st year of Moore proposal is TROPICOS--discovery and how it will interact with EOL/BHL etc. Need the time because changes bring unexpected things. TOPAZ (interface between FEDORA and PLOS) /PLOS for interaction; Informatics group? Paddy or Paddy's designate will need to attend BHL architecture meeting.

Tom is heading to St. Louis and he and Chris will send out a revised list of attendees for Architecture meeting.

2. Revised membership and relationships doc; much tighter and clear. Tom will send it to Directors and put on Wiki after removing word draft; Graham thinks it will work with European and other partners; Australia and Berlin will be full members;

3. Update on discussions with Jim Omura (Moore Foundation) invited a proposal for automated markup for serial literature (math and science); structural and possibly semantic markup. Preliminary but move quickly.

4. Global collections index from TDWG; will help identify literature component for collections; Europeans have done some work, Australians can do this. Connie will ask Roger what he wants for an endorsement and then we can draft one if it is helpful.

5 Reports:
Graham didn't go to OECD global science forum meeting (came up with idea of GBIF) in Amsterdam but reports that there is a proposal for 2nd meeting in DC and want to bring components for shared collection systems (EMU), shared data, shared information systems (BHL) and shared service systems (EOL); keep an eye out for any activity here because important.

BUFFON sidebar meeting on zoo nomenclature (ICZN): (based at NHM-- UK based trust) but director Michael Dixon says not a long-term sustainable model so how move forward? No funding structure to keep ZooBank running. Group of Museum directors will look at longer term model (annual fee? subscription model?); Directors were very open to funding this as a corporate support. What museums: NHM, Paris, Berlin, Stuttgart, Royal Museum Brussels, Catalonia Museum Barcelona, AMNH, Smithsonian, Bavarian Museums, Firenze, Australia, Canada

BUFFON--networking with small meeting; lots of European deals and meetings set up; visit from Prince of Monaco (trained scientist) with Money: interested in biodiversity/conservation/sustainability issues. He was very interested and knowledgeable. BUFFON declaration--how important this science area is; speaks strongly to science being disseminated, not religion.

EOL Steering Committee: exec director reports and team leaders reports were very good--lots of detail; Development Professional Meeting went well and that group will meet 2 times per year, once with Board. We need to be plugged in to this--Tom is contact but need someone else--he has too much to do focusing on the main task; need to think about how to do "asks" and development work. This is an increasing need. Graham has ideas but doesn't have anyone to feed them to. Board also agreed on a slightly revised copyright/licensing policy. Institutional Council --a few more players. Open to all Steering Committee and leaders of individual work packages. Tom is giving a presentation -- Nov 26-27. EOL Board made arrangements for next two meetings: Feb in San Francisco and next set for June 2-3 in London, late September in Boston or Woods Hole. International informatics meeting in London in 2009--lots of funding sources.

GSIS proposal originally produced in May for EU--just before EOL launch; Rainer Froese based in Kiel. Wants to have second crack at European funding for a European EOL; Get Chris to go and then move to Berlin for eContentplus proposal for managing European BHL bid. (Dec 10-12 in Kiel, Germany).

LIBER Workshop on Digitization of Library Material in Europe in Copenhagen; lots of useful people to meet. Dutch are very involved in mass digitization (Dutch national Library leading biggest European scanning project) also Germans are whizzes on technical side; Latvia has decided to scan all the literature in the Latvian language-- biological material? They want to be involved in BHL. Latvia will pay for this. Google Europe spoke and said how wonderful Google is. Why can't we get our scanned material to do with what we like? Google wasn't happy with Creative Commons!!

6. Number of pages done is question most asked--Website figure is too low.
Send number to BHL list every month. (Quarterly Report has IA and TROPICOS and separately done materials--complete as of Oct 1). Tom will re-query to update.

7. Tom will send email to reschedule next conference call.