SIL NPS May 8 2009

NPS Staff Update

Publicity and Outreach

BHL Meet and Greets
- There was a successful BHL orientation for the Reptiles Department
- The VZ orientation had only 3 staff, but was well received
- There will be another for the Botany Department later this month
BHL cards

Usage Statistics (January - April 2009)

173,000 visitors to the BHL portal/ ~50% of those visits were by machines harvesting data
Wikipedia is the 3rd highest referrer to BHL (meaning that people clicked on links in Wikipedia directing them to BHL content; increasingly, Wikipedia editors are linking to species information in BHL)
6,398 visitors to the BHL blog during that same time period; 1% of all BHL blog traffic comes from Twitter and Facebook
Visitors: 173,000
Page views: 901,000
Visitors arrive from:
- Google (51%)
- Directly (21%)
- EOL (4.15%)
- Wikipedia (2.2%)
Countries/Territories: 214 countries and territories; everywhere except for North Korea, Chad, Central African Republic, Western Sahara, Sierra Leone,Serbia, and Kyrgyzstan

Funding

CIS Pool Fund news: SIL received $50,000 from the CIS pool funds for FY 2009 to complete serial holdings on BHL related titles; this is the third year in a row that SIL has received pool funds specifically for BHL. Previous years saw allocations of $80,000 (FY 2007) and $70,000 (FY 2008). This is a total of $200,000 that SIL has received from the Institution for support of BHL activities. Serials holding, however, benefit the overall quality of the SIRIS library catalog
$30,000 (for FY 2008 and FY 2009) from the SIL Seidell allocation for BHL was transfered to the SIL Cataloging contract to support work on serials holdings and to increase the quality of rare book cataloging
The next installment of the MacArthur/Sloan funding is expected in later summer
BHL members received a $40,000 IMLS planning grant to study issues related to "special" materials (these include folios, rare books, fragile books, tightly bound items etc.). SIL is participating in this grant and will participate in any follow on work

Still filling in at various IZ locations; most VZ locations are complete (monographs), but Mammals will start early next week; filling in for serials and to get items that were passed over earlier (because of foldouts, etc.) will be ongoing.

Work on the new "library" front end for the BHL portal is underway; look forward to a more functional interface later this summer.
The problem with searching for authors/titles with diacritics has been solved; this should resolve some of the searching frustrations we've experienced with the portal
Staff at all BHL libraries are now editing data to reflect serials holdings (i.e. fixing volume and date issues, merging serial titles scanned at multiple locations, etc.). PLEASE DIRECT problems you come across to Suzanne Pilsk and she'll assign the problem to the correct library/person

CITE: The BHL Article Repository

BHL article repository now in alpha testing (http://cite.biodiversitylibrary.org/). PLEASE NOTE: this is very much an alpha release and will be very sketchy!
CITE will be a location for taxonomic groups to deposit previously scanned articles (as well as deposit taxa-specific bibliographies which can be used for scanning prioritization)

FedScan (located at Library of Congress) ~ 200 volumes per week
NH Scribe (down the hall from the Cullman) ~ special collections, items in need of special handling or care