Kickoff meeting (February 19, 2010)

Attending: Andrew Doran, Dick Moe, Lam Voong, Marlita Kahn, Chris Hoffman
In this short kickoff meeting, the project team talked about some general issues and context for this project.  More information will be put together over the next couple weeks (project plans and timelines), but we are ready to get started!  We compared this effort to the PAHMA deployment, agreeing that in many ways, the Herbaria migration should be more straightforward. Dick and Andrew asked how much they would need to be involved. We are still working on a resource picture for what is required, but we know the project will need them for things like data quality issues, data mapping, to set priorities, and to help the CollectionSpace team understand things like taxonomy and taxonomic identification. Taxonomy is probably our biggest challenge. CollectionSpace has a model for it based on controlled vocabulary service, but now we need to start finding out exactly how this will work (or in the next month or two).
There are significant overlaps with functionality and data across BNHM and especially with the Botanical Garden. We'll figure out how to maximize this, but will keep an eye on it. This is an important priority for the BNHM-IST Steering Committee.
Initially we can focus on basic data migration of simple objects with limited fields, following the PAHMA methodology. Start with a limited data set (40-50 representative records), and map a subset of fields (10-15) to the core object schema. Lam, Dick and Andrew discussed some likely data and will follow up. We need to make sure we are focusing on data in SMaSCH rather than just test data that exist in a spreadsheet because half the battle is getting data out of one system and into another.
Question: how much data cleansing to do in the short term? But long term, need to consider this long and hard and determine what tools CS will provide to help this cleansing.
We started talking about some SMaSCH data elements such as vouchers. There will be some data mapping, cleansing, and migration challenges ahead of us!