EDIT WP6

Scratchpads are intended to foster the development of communities working toward a common goal of creating and sharing data about biological organisms of the web. They do this through a Content Management System (Drupal) that has been customised to the needs of biological taxonomists by members of the European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy (EDIT), based at the Natural History Museum in London. As the sites grow, EDIT will plug-in additional tools and services (modules) that add Scratchpad functions. Sites are mounted at a web address of the users choice that EDIT will purchase on behalf of the sites user community. EDIT also provides backup, support and manages the hardware, leaving users free to worry about what is important – the sites content!

Each site allows users to compose and present web site content such as articles, photos, literature, and other content types. Rather than forcing users to specify a fixed, pre-declared arrangement of content, the Content Management System takes care of the details of how information is arranged and presented. Most content like text and images is stored in a database that users submit to by filling in forms via a web browser. When visitors view a page, the system gets the relevant bits of content from the database and composes all of the components of the page in a template. This makes it easy to quickly add or change content, without requiring the users to know how to create web pages. A moderator who takes ultimate responsibility for the sites content runs each of the template sites. The moderator assigns new users with different rolls that provide users with access to different features, such as the ability to configure, contribute or edit the site, and access to the sites private areas. The Content Management System is designed to make this relatively easy and very little technical knowledge is assumed.

What can the scratchpads do?

• If you already have a web site we can import on mass your entire old site content into your new scratchpad.
• You can upload share and annotate thousands of images using the sites Specimen Image Database (SID) tool. We can help you to populate this database if you already have a collection of images.
• Upload share and edit thousands of bibliographic references using the sites Bibliographic Module. If you are already using a reference manager like Endnote you can populate your sites literature database in seconds.
• Share and manage written documents like word and PDF files using the sites document store.
• Manage hundreds of users and automatically categorize the content they create using the sites “taxonomy” tool.
• Create private portions of the site and restrict assess to sets of site users.
• Manage a forum to allow sites users to communicate with each other.
• Search the public portions of the sites content through a simple search interface.
• See who is looking at the scratchpad web pages, how the visitor got to those pages, and what search engine keywords they used via the sites sophisticated logging and tracking capabilities.
• Roll back individually saved changes on a page, with the sites built in archive capability.
• Aggregate content from other websites via their sites RSS news feeds.
• Pull content from third party websites like Flickr and YouTube into your scratchpad.
• Share your sites content as RSS news feed so others can be automatically alerted when new content appears on your site.
• Customize the look and feel of the site through different "themes". You can use one of the core themes or one of the contributed Drupal themes.
• Create selected content offline using an external site editor. Some of these allow users to electronically submit their contribution without ever visiting the Scratchpad site.
• Place the site at a domain name (like www.example.org) of your choose which we will purchase for you.

To get a better idea of how the scratchpads can be used and configured, take a look at some of the scratchpad sites already being served from Natural History Museum, Servers:

• Milichiid flies (http://www.milichiidae.info/)
• Fungus Gnats (http://www.sciaroidea.info/)

 We have a several more sites that will come on line soon. These include communities of researchers working on Costa Rican invertebrates, parasitic lice (www.phthiraptera.org), dung beetles, corals and weevils.

What can the scratchpad sites not do?

Web content served by modules dedicated to a particular kind of data is highly structured and can be reused throughout the site and even in other websites. At present modules with this kind of functionality support taxonomic images, literature, documents, forum comments and blog entries. Other types of data, such as that associated with specimens, collections, DNA, and taxonomic keys are not stored in a highly structured way. These data can be incorporated “free form” on any page on the site, but will not benefit from the advantages of using a purposed built module. In time we hope to build such modules to accommodate these types of data, but the decision to do this rests with those running the EDIT project. See out “long term plans” for more information.

What are the Scratchpads conditions of use?

We have developed single page “conditions of use” document that outlines the conditions through which we are offering these scratchpads. All users contributing the site must accept these conditions of use.

How do I get one?

The Scratchpads will be formally be announced at an EDIT workshop at the Natural History Museum in April 2007. At that time will have in place a signup form where you can make your site request. This signup form will be connected to this website in due course.

What are the long term plans for these Scratchpad sites?

The Natural History Museum has given a commitment to maintain the server space for these community sites in perpetuity so long as it is reasonable practical for them to do so. With regard to the Scratchpad templates long-term development, this will be subject to a review by our colleagues working on EDIT work package 5 at the Free University of Berlin. The functionality of these sites will be retained regardless of this review, but the final delivery platform for these data may change. Subject to the outcome of this review, the development priorities for those involved in the project at the Natural History Museum are as follows:

• Better integration of the Specimen Image Database (SID) as a fully featured Drupal module.
• Development of a purpose built Drupal module for biological taxonomic names.
• The ability to search the all scratchpads site content through a single search portal. This will be done using the OpenSearch protocol.
• Automatic aggregate the bibliographies in each scratchpad with a view to solving the assisting with the deduplication of individual site bibliographies. This will be done using the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting which is already been added to the scratchpads to supplement the functionality of the Bibliography module.