September 16, 2013

Tech Team meeting 9/16/13

Present: Trish, William, Mike, Bianca
Art of Life
Algorithm status? Still waiting to find out when Woods Hole will assign time to this.
Alternative ideas – Kyle run algorithm on IMA server. Chuck liked this idea. Trish can followup with Kyle. Need to identify a subset of books to run this on. Could we start with master list of ids and break this up? Set up 10k?
Worth contacting IA to see if they can support it? William will contact Hank contact at IA. Robert often doesn’t answer so maybe start with Hank. Not clear chain of command. How can this benefit IA? Could help them find images in their texts, contribute large number of images to IA.
Face to Face meeting – reserved 3 sep rooms within an apt (Rob, Gaurav, Anthony)
Trish Started looking at JSON output but then got distracted with other stuff – she will let Mike know which data should be stored in BHL

DLF conference
(week of Nov 4th) – BHL and DPLA will be conducting a presentation and mini hackathon
““Collection assessment in a collaborative environment: BHL and DPLA”
Both want to develop a detailed view of each collections subject coverage to locate gaps in order to identify additional materials for digitization. DPLA is also interested in identifying and linking controlled vocabs with URIs to string terms in their collections.

1. 1. Interested in discussing and playing around with visualization tools that could drill down from broad terms (e.g. Trees-North America) to more specific terms (e.g. Pinus banksiana) using thesauri specific to biodiversity and connecting them to LCSH hierarchies.
2. 2. Vocab identification tool that could throw subject headings at open controlled vocabs to associate terms and grab URIs

During the hackathon Connie needs either a filtered set of BHL data to let participants play with or instructions on how to grab the data themselves.
Selected records – e.g. all SI plus Ernst Mayr Library records (I presume title level records?) + Names records
Can we recommend any APIs for taxonomic data that can help connect the species names to its broader term? Probably difficult at uBio for example wouldn’t use the same terminology for Trees as LSCH
Trish will set up call with William, Connie, Trish, Bianca to talk further about her needs
BHL Staff Call
Bianca asked if William would do a tech update
User contributed articles in beta
Wait til more feedback from other staff and discuss next week
GNA services
New service from GNRD – Mike has created an intermediate page on beta for sources of a name. Mike dumping all the data right now to the page and we need to decide how we want it to sort it and display. This allows us to show the best match from multiple taxonomic sources. This is all info that is stored in the Global Names Server that we’ve been using for about 4-6 months (replaced just searching in uBio). We set it up awhile back but it was slower than uBio so we said we couldn’t use it until Woods Hole improved it. Dima offered to set up a server just for BHL to make it faster but hasn’t happened yet. This is why we haven’t publically announced it. Bianca would like William to include in the Tech update for Thursdays staff call. Bianca wondered why isn’t intermediate page the bibliography and then get to the GRND data sources from there? Depends on the audience using BHL and their interest. This is a valid suggestion and wouldn’t change the flow. This would also reduce the load on the GNRD server.

Macarthur reports –
William working on quarterly reports back to 2007 – this is needed by Smithsonian. Chris and Tom did a different reporting schedule.

Travel
William out next week Mon-Wed In person Meeting next week in Woods Hole with William, Joel, John, Joe, Martin, Bob, Anthony, Nathan.