Usage update
As of today (Dec. 13th) the Scratchpads have attracted 220 registered users in 28+ countries, who have collectively built more than 96,143 pages (nodes) since March 2007. Collectively the sites attract approximately 170 unique visitors per day, who each spend an average of 7 minutes looking at 8.3 pages. Of these visitors 60.8% have never previously looked at the Scratchpads. Over the past month the Scratchpads have attracted a total of 43,379 pageviews, reaching a maximum daily peek of 3,387 pageviews on 20th Nov. 2007.

Google Analytics
Since late October we have been using Google Analytics to measure Scratchpad activity across all the sites. These data (like that listed above) provide a detailed breakdown of who is looking at the site, what they are looking at, and how they arrive (e.g. search keywords used). Some of this data is replicated on our server logs, which also provide us with a site-specific breakdown of who created content within any one site. As part of our future activities we will be developing some bibliometric (cybermetric) indicators for the creators and users of Scratchpad content.

Support from GBIF
GBIF are supporting the development of Scratchpad functionality by placing an embedded programmer with us at the Natural History Museum. This post was created by David Remsen (GBIF Programme Officer), and will be focused on developing tools and services for the GBIF’s ECAT (Electronic Catalogue of Names) program that will benefit many biodiversity informatics projects including Scratchpad users. In the first instance we are developing multilingual content and services for taxonomic ranks, country names and languages. Our approach will be sufficiently generic that we can do the same for other vocabularies such as journal names and abbreviations. The post has been filled, and the developer will join us in April. In the meantime we have already started on development of the services. See http://www.gbif.myspecies.info/

Support from the NHM, London
To complement our development funds from GBIF we received several months worth of developer support from NHM funds. These are being used to explore new ways of displaying Scratchpad data. We recently hired Ben Scott, a freelance web developer from Brighton to complete this work. Ben has done some fantastic Drupal sites (check out his portfolio) and joins Simon Rycroft and myself on the Scratchpad development team.

Long-term support
Looking beyond EDIT (the project partly sponsoring the Scratchpads), we are beginning to make plans to support the Scratchpads and their userbase beyond 2010. In the first instance we have included support for a Scratchpad developer as part of a NERC consortium proposal submitted on Dec. 1st 2007 with Kew Gardens and the University of Oxford. If funded, this post will allow us to develop Scratchpad functionality as a biodiversity resource for monocot plants. The tools and services developed from this project will be sufficiently generic that they will benefit all Scratchpad users.

New BioImage Module
Until now, Scratchpad users have had to rely on our “Specimen Image Database” (SID) web application to upload, annotate and share images. While useful for biological images, many users found it too limited for their needs. The new BioImage module will replace SID on all sites (we will migrate content as necessary), and provide an integrated Drupal solution to handling images within the Scratchpads. The BioImage module supports drag-and-drop multiple image upload (12Mb limit per image), multiple image selection, minimal “required” fields, and an intuitive interface to provide detailed annotation of images on mass. This comes with full Darwin Core support. Notwithstanding a minor display bug for geolocating images, the module is complete and will be rolled out shortly, and we will release the source code.

New Gallery Features
As part of the new BioImage module we have improved the image gallery functionality and included “lightbox” support with the Drupal lightbox module. To see a nice example of this, try browsing some of the cockroach image galleries on the Blattodea Culture Group Scratchpad.

Taxonomy Services
We have added a series of tools to improve the way Scratchpads handle taxonomy. In most cases we have tested these with classifications of up to 50,000 taxa (occasionally we have tried up to 200,000 names) and not run into any difficulties.

Import: You can now import entire taxonomic classifications at the click of a button from entries in uBio’s classification bank. At the moment you can do this for any taxon within the Species2000, NCBI, and ITIS classification. However, in principal, there is no reason why we could not do this for any of the hundreds of classifications in classification bank, and we are looking to support this in the very near future. In the meantime, if you do not want to use these names you can import you own classification with the aid of an Excel spreadsheet. We support three data formats (parent-child, tabbed, and full classification) and have a template that included examples of each. These can be imported along with classification bank entries under the import tab of the categories pages.

Management: We have rolled out Matthias Hutterer’s Drupal Taxonomy Manager across all the sites. This provides an intuitive graphical interface for deleting, adding, moving, and merging taxonomic terms.

Searching and Browsing: We have written the tinyTax module for intuitively browsing large classifications. This is based on Rod Page’s Pygmy browse approach to browsing taxonomic trees. We have also put together a module called taxTab that allows uses to switch between tabs for searching the full content of a site, or a restricted set of taxonomic terms. The taxonomy search will auto complete taxonomic names matching those stored within a Scratchpad.

Specimen module (with Darwin Core support)
We have written a new specimen module with an intuitive graphical interface that integrates with data stored throughout a users' Scratchpad. The module is compliant with version 1.2.1 of the Darwin Core. This means that Scratchpad users will be able to seamlessly serve their specimen data to GBIF from the Scratchpads. We will do this with the aid of TapirLink. The specimen module will be rolled out very shortly, with TapirLink added by late January.

Improved server performance
Early January we will start put together a strategy for migrating the Scratchpads to a faster, larger server at the NHM with more memory and service support. Apart from some downtime (no more than an hour) users will not notice the switchover. However, once complete, Scratchpad users will benefit from more server space (crucial for all those images people are uploading), improved memory (vital for services built onto the taxonomy module), and guaranteed downtime notice. Please bear with us on this one. We want to ensure the solution we put in place is scalable to meets the growing demand for Scratchpads, and is sustainable beyond the EDIT program of work. This costs money and will take time!

Help Screencasts and hands on training
We are conscious that many users still find the Scratchpads hard to use. The Scratchpad task guide and twenty-four help screencasts have aided early adopters, but there is still a lot more we can do to hide some of the complexity that frankly most users don’t need to see. A priority for early 2008 will be to update the Screencasts, many of which are now out of date. We will also be proving more hands on support in the form of practical training sessions held at the NHM, London. The first of these will be at the NHM in late February (more details to follow), and should this prove successful, we will hold more at other locations in the near future.

One more thing…
I almost forgot. We are working on new ways of aggregating and integrating data held within and outside the Scratchpads. We expect this to have a major impact on the way people use and contribute to the sites. I will be demonstrating a prototype of this as part of the EDIT General meeting in Carvoeiro, near Faro, Portugal, on the 23 and 24 Jan. 2008, but for a hint of what we are doing, check out my earlier posts on mySpecies and iSpecies.