TechCall_12sept2016

Agenda

Discussion of 'Contributors' - meaning of field, ambiguity, and clarifiying

The “Contributor” field is currently being interpreted in various ways by BHL partners. EABL, BHL Australia, SANBI, and the oncoming BHL Europe items are examples of how Contributor could be interpreted to mean different things. Thus we clarified the definition in our metadata documentation http://bit.do/BHLmetadata as follows:

"Entity providing the physical copy of the content for inclusion in the BHL collection. For born-digital content, the Contributor may also be the Rights Holder.”

We want to ensure consistency of the field going forward. It’s also valuable for BHL users to understand where the physical items are located since we are predominantly serving the users of our home institutions. Thus we are considering a label change from “Contributor” to “Holding Institution” to clarify this point and would like to discuss this on Monday’s Tech call. I have invited Bianca to join so she can speak to the various use cases.

The crux of all this “contributor” business is that everyone wants recognition for the work they are doing to grow the BHL collection. Some of our smaller partners do not have the resources to contribute like our founding Member libraries for example. In order to ensure this recognition, we would like to propose that the Contributor browse aggregate all content provider items, regardless of the contributor/rights-holder/scanning-institution field, under the institution name. (No need to change the “Contributor” button on the home page). This has the benefit of allowing everyone’s contributions to appear equally together as well as highlighting those institutions that have provided permission for in-copyright content. On the backend the contributor reports should stay as is for now.

Down the road, it would be nice to have a way to filter by Holding Institution vs. Scanning Institution vs. Rights Holder, at least via the Admin Dash but perhaps too via the UI. The filtering could be considered as a BHLv2 issue so nothing required for the immediate future.

Use Cases

BHL	Definition	Rationale	IA	Macaw
Contributor	Entity providing the physical copy of the content for inclusion in the BHL collection. For born-digital content, the Contributor may also be the Rights Holder.	Credit to holding organization	contributor	contributor
Rights Holder	Entity granting permission for inclusion in BHL collection	Credit to permission provider	rights-holder	rights_holder
Scanning Institution	Entity funding digitization/uploading of materials to BHL collection	Credit to digitizing/uploading organization	scanning-institution	scanning_institution
Sponsor	Entity funding digitization/uploading of materials to BHL collection	Credit to funding organization	sponsor	sponsor

Examples	Standard BHL item	BHL Europe item	IMLS e-content item	BHL Africa	Permissions item	BHL Australia
Sponsor	Smithsonian Libraries	BHL Europe	IMLS Expanding Access	JRS Foundation	American Entomological Society	Atlas of Living Australia
Contributor	Smithsonian Libraries	Berlin Natural History Museum	USA Zoo Society	Harvard MCZ	Smithsonian Libraries	Australian Museum (except it's MV's copy see https://archive.org/details/Memoir12)
Rights Holder	NULL	German Hops Club	USA Zoo Society	SANBI	American Entomological Society	Australian Museum
Collection1	biodiversity	biodiversity	biodiversity	biodiversity	biodiversity	biodiversity
Collection2	Smithsonian Libraries	bhleurope (proposed)	bhlexpandingaccess	MCZ	Smithsonian Libraries	bhlaustralia (proposed)
Collection3	NULL	NULL	NULL	African biodiversity	NULL	NULL
Scanning Institution	NULL	MCZ	(NYBG or EABL or NULL?)	NULL	NULL	NULL