Strategic Advisory Board Meeting Minutes - June 17, 2009

HathiTrust Strategic Advisory Board

Meeting Notes

Wednesday June 17, 2009

Present:                 

Purpose of Meeting: Organize the initial efforts of the HathiTrust Strategic Advisory Board (SAB)

I.          Notetaking

Meeting notes will be taken by alphabetic rotation and will capture overview information, key points, and decisions made.  Within one week of the meeting, draft notes will be circulated for corrections and flagging sensitive information.  Final notes will be posted on the HathiTrust web site <http://www.hathitrust.org/>

II.          Introductions

Each SAB member introduced him/herself by name, affiliation, professional role and related experience, and particular experience and/or perspective relevant to the work of the SAB.

III.          Review Charge/Membership/Term/Reporting Line

Key points made about the charge and reporting line:

• The SAB is charged is “shape and recommend new directions for the HathiTrust.”
• Chair Van Gemert highlighted Executive Director Wilkin’s encouragement that the SAB think critically and skeptically about issues, and not hesitate to pushback where necessary.

Key points made about how the SAB will operate:

• The SAB reports to the HathiTrust Executive Committee, which meets monthly (late in the month).
• The SAB chair (Ed Van Gemert) is not ex-officio to the Executive Committee. There is need to formalize a communications-liaison link between the SAB and the Executive Committee.
• The group reaffirmed the role of the Executive Director Wilkin’s role on the SAB and noted the usefulness of the Executive Director’s input in key discussions as the HathiTrust organization grows.  The Executive Director does not set agendas; the chair along with input from the SAB will collaboratively develop agendas with input as necessary.
• The SAB is committed to openness, candidness, and acceptance of respectful disagreements.
• The SAB members need clarity on what/who each of us is representing on specific issues.  That is, in expressing a viewpoint, might we be representing the partnership, a consortium, an individual institution, etc.
• Chair Van Gemert  encouraged SAB members to bring to the group’s and chair’s attention if the SAB is not working and changes will be considered.
• Noting the presence of budget-related travel restrictions, the SAB will operate largely as a “virtual body,” but may need to meet face-to-face occasion.  There is concern about the effectiveness of very long conference calls (e.g., 3 hours in length).
• In its start-up phase, the SAB will plan to meet via teleconference mode more frequently (60-90 minute meetings every two weeks)

IV.        Background Issues and Context for SAB work

• The SAB was established to guide the HathiTrust’s strategic direction and development agenda.  The SAB also is viewed as a vehicle for instigating collective action, and will be called upon to give structure to operational working groups.
• The HathiTrust is already making significant progress against an earlier established agenda, which includes short- and long-term functional objectives <http://www.hathitrust.org/objectives>. Executive Director Wilkin provided examples of where operations have made significant progress against these objectives in the first year (i.e., large-scale search) and where it has fallen short of aspirations, due to underestimated levels of difficulty (i.e., non-Google ingest).
• The SAB will be asked to address longer-term needs (e.g., taking responsibility for conducting the three-year review of the HathiTrust in 2011) and more pressing needs (e.g., formulating a response to the “drift” on Google’s quality threshold for scanning and, in this, determining a re-calibrated metric alongside other forms of quality assurance and monitoring).
• A question was raised about the level of issues at which the SAB addresses or provides direct inputs (e.g., strategic level vs. operational/technical levels).  These determinations will need to be made as work unfolds.  The SAB can spin off work to other HT groups if deemed appropriate.

V.         Next Steps

• We pinpointed the need to initial outcomes and analysis and agreed to begin this round robin via e-mail.  Alongside this, Chair Van Gemert and Executive Director Wilkin will prepare a timeline for the many short- and long-term objectives that have been identified by the EC and the SAB .
• Our initial focus will be to better understand and hopefully improve upon the Google quality assessment, error rates and HT ingest.  That will be the topic for our next call, at which we invite Paul Fogel, Technical Lead, Mass Digitization, California Digital Library, who has prepared an analysis of Google error rates (distributed by Patricia Cruse on 6/17/2009 via e-mail attachment).

Next meeting:                  Thursday, July 9, 1:00-2:30 p.m. CDT