Culture of Peace Initiative

Scratchpads are an easy to use, social networking application that enable communities of researchers to manage, share and publish taxonomic data online. Sites are hosted at the Natural History Museum London, and offered free to any scientist that completes an online registration form. Key features of the Scratchpads include tools to manage:

Classifications     Phylogeny     Phylogenies
Literature     Bibliographies     Documents     Documents
Images     Image galleries     Custom Data     Custom data
Specimens     Specimen records     Simple Maps     Maps

The Scratchpad project is open to anybody who has biological content of scientific value or interest and would like to develop this on a website. There are NO restrictions as long as users conform to a minimal set of legally binding terms and conditions as outlined below. Site maintainers are compelled to click through this agreement when they first join a site and it is the site maintainer’s responsibility to enforce this agreement on all subsequent registered users. By default new users are also presented with this click through agreement. However, site maintainers can at their discretion alter this agreement for subsequent users to suit their own needs.

What technology does the Scratchpads use?

The Scratchpad project is about tweaking Drupal's underlying infrastructure to make it easier to use and better suited to the needs of the taxonomic and systematic community. We do this by developing specific modules that support specific taxonomic data types (e.g. biological specimens and literature), templates for the import and export of data (e.g. taxonomic classifications), and by making web services of other data readily accessible (e.g. Google Scholar, Biodiversity Heritage Library, flickr, NCBI Genbank etc). The Scratchpad project also hosts all this content, making is simpler for users to establish a rich web presence that is supported and built by a community of users.

Why choose the name Scratchpads?

The name continues to evoke mixed feelings amongst both the developers and users of the Scratchpads. Dave Roberts originally proposed the name, despite mild objection from Vince Smith. Vince has since become a fierce advocate of the name, while Dave has proposed that it be changed on several occasions! Eventually it is possible that the Scratchpads will evolve into a system that is integrated with the Encyclopedia of Life project, at which point the name may change. Regardless, this or any subsequent name is largely irrelevant. Scratchpads users brand their sites with their own names and logos to reflect their sites content and purpose. The majority of users are not even aware of the Scratchpad project. In this sense Vince has christened the Scratchpads as the "anti-brand". The only evidence that people are using or viewing a Scratchpad is in the footer of each page. Arguably, the Scratchpad branfs invisibility has been fundamental to the Scratchpads success.