BHL Collections Management

Editor's Notes

• #2: Total 11 min[30 sec] Hello everyone, I am Bianca Crowley, the Collections Coordinator for the BHL US/UK working out of the Smithsonian Libraries in Washington DC. 2 things: What are your needs? Understanding this can help us improve our documentation in an effort to shorten the time it may take for you to fulfill your needs; my impression from yesterday is that BHLA is at step 1.5, this accurate?, I can appreciate full well how daunting steps 2-1000, this is where everyone is when they get started but with a shared vision of what you want for BHL Africa there are nothing but possibilities ahead of you; BHL US/UK has taken many many steps over past 8 years, today overview of Collection Development and Digitization workflow paths. Confirm idea that BHLA will contribute content into the BHL website?
• #3: [1 min] Collection mgmt to me is a continuous cycle of pre-digitization and post-digitization workflows Getting the content scanned is 1 thing and managing the content after it’s been scanned is just as important Among our consortium libraries we have staff that dedicate themselves to different aspects of the cycle; some focus on pre, some post, most both! You’ll notice that our users play a key role in the cycle
• #4: [2 min]BHL US/UK process is based on the following selection criteriaOur collective strength is that we are able to aggregate our unique and rare materials in one placeUnique materials from your collections would be a fantastic addition to the collectionPermissions titles = in-copyright content for which we obtain explicit permission via a signed license agreement to include their content in the BHLWe receive requests from our users and fulfill these as we can, especially in the case of filling gaps within a serial run or seriesIn the early days of BHL US/UK, each institution selected a discipline specific subject area (Entomology, Botany, etc.) to start scanningLike the BHL, many libraries across the world scan materials with the Internet Archive and the majority of the content is open access. We benefit from those other libraries by using a set of subject headings and call numbers to regularly harvest biodiversity-related materials from the University of Toronto, or the California Digital Library for example, into the BHL collection
• #5: [30 sec]We actively collect content within these core (blue) and supporting (green) subject areasWe have materials beyond this central scope but when prioritizing what to scan, we rely on these guidelinesVisual diagram a part of our collection development policyI encourage you to think about what is core to your institution to develop a collective sense of core collections for BHL Africa
• #6: [1 min]Duplication is a difficult issueBack-end db
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• #14: Requires loginWeb-based Administrative interface to access the backend BHL database so that we can make corrections to our collection as necessary.Only correct as users indicate errors
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• #16: [30 sec]BHL Collections CommitteeTrustShared vision – get as much biodiversity literature accessible, for free, online as possible
• #17: [30 sec]COLLABORATION!We could not do what we do without the tools to collaborate and communicate effectively across institutions and timezones. Only a few institutions have full time staff that can dedicate themselves to BHL project work and most of our institutions donate a portion of there staff's time in addition to their regular duties. I like to think of it as working with a team of skilled volunteers. They do fantastic work but at different rates and times. This means finding the right tools for the tasks (and there are many!). You can see that we use as many free tools as possible. One tool that we do pay for however, is our issue tracking system which is the best tool we have for following up on feedback from our users and supporting the kind of detailedcommunication and documentation we need.
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