The Scratchpad project has seen a number of developments recently. Here is a quick update on the key topics.

Drupal 6
Work to upgrade the Scratchpads to version 6 of the Drupal Content Management System is complete. This has involved rewriting 23 modules, and updating 44 contributed modules. All new sites are getting a Drupal 6 Scratchpad, and we are working on converting the 100+ existing sites. This conversion will introduce a new, simplified interface to users. Thus, we are doing this on a site-by-site basis, with the permission and cooperation of existing site maintainers.

Site Management and Distributed Hosting
As part of the Drupal 6 upgrade we have simplified the way we role out new sites and site upgrades. This makes our administration of the sites easier, but more importantly it will make our work much easier when we start distributing Scratchpads to be hosted at other institutions. This is something we have had a lot of interest in from researchers in Europe, the US and South America. Two US institutions (New York Botanic Gardens and Chicago Field Museum) have already been experimenting with hosting Scratchpad servers.

Matrix Editor
We are working on a spreadsheet-editing interface that is embedded within the Scratchpads. The first phase of this will support the creation of a matrix of characters (single or multi-state, morphological or molecular). The second phase will support matrix editing of all Scratchpad content. Both these phases will be complete by June, although additional import export options will take longer to complete.

EOL / LifeDesks
We are working with the Encyclopedia of Life’s LifeDesk team to make sure we coordinate our development activities. LifeDesks are geared toward writing EOL species page and we should soon be able to facilitate this functionality in the Scratchpads. This will require a few tweaks to the way LifeDesks manage taxonomic names and classifications, and may take a few weeks to sort these out because the LifeDesk team are focused on the beta LifeDesk launch. However, it will allow Scratchpad users to write EOL species pages in the near future.

User Statistics
We passed the 100 Scratchpad site mark in April and now have close to 1,200 registered users. Collectively these users have created almost 170,000 pages (nodes) of content. To help us keep track of these statistics, we have put together a public statistics page that is automatically updated daily.

e-Biosphere 09
The Scratchpads will be represented on the EDIT and NHM stand at the upcoming e-Biosphere meeting. We will also have a separate poster at the conference and will be covered during the EDIT talk that will be give by Dave Roberts on day one of the meeting.

Training
We are running a series of four, one-day training events alongside various conferences in 2009. These courses will be run on Thursday June 4th at the Natural History Museum London, at the end of the eBiosphere meeting; Monday 10th August at the BioSyst 2009 conference in Leiden; the EDIT general meeting (late 2009, TBC); and a special developers course provisionally scheduled for the TDWG meeting in Montpellier this November. To find out more and to sign-up for one of these courses, complete the form on the Scratchpad Training webpage.

Grants / Sustainability
We recently learnt that our bid to the BBSRC Tools and Resources fund to develop and enhance web services on Scratchpad data “failed”. We had two reviews, one of which spanned several pages, was extensive and glowing in it praise of the project. The other was 6 sentences, 3 of which repeated the aims of the project, and the other 3 were wholly inaccurate. Unfortunately the BBSRC panel went with the view expressed in the inaccurate 3 sentences. Despite this we are continuing to explore opportunities to sustain the project beyond EDIT. Specifically we will be looking at European (e.g. INFRA-2010-1.2.3: Virtual Research Communities) and other UK funding opportunities. Ultimately the success of the Scratchpads will rest in distributing the platform and development activities across multiple institutions, and for the user community to value its services.