Zookeys has published a special issue with many interesting papers of which several relate to Scratchpads. For example:

• Smith et al.: Scratchpads 2.0: a Virtual Research Environment supporting scholarly collaboration, communication and data publication in biodiversity science.
• Brake et al.: Who learns from whom? Supporting users and developers of a major biodiversity e-infrastructure.
• Duin & van den Besselaar: Studying the effects of virtual biodiversity research infrastructures.
• Baker et al.: The future of the past in the present: biodiversity informatics and geological time.
• Faulwetter et al.: Sphaerosyllis levantina sp. n. (Annelida) from the eastern Mediterranean, with notes on character variation in Sphaerosyllis hystrix Claparède, 1863.
  

The training courses for 2012 are now open for registration on the training page. We are offering several basic and advanced courses as well as a Scratchpad 2 updater session for current maintainers to familiarise themselves with the upcoming new version.

You are welcome to suggest further training courses at your institution or at a suitable conference.

Dear Scratchpads users,

The Scratchpad team is planning Scratchpad training courses for 2012-2013. We drafted a list of upcoming conferences that could be opportunities to give Scratchpad training courses.

We would like to have your advice on the following. Could you have a look at the attached list and if you think that certain conferences -or others that are not listed- would be a good occasion to have a training course please let us know. Suggestions can be sent to Isa.Vandevelde@naturalsciences.be or can be posted here on the blog.

Many thanks in advance for your feedback.
Cheers,
Isa & Irina

Many users have complained that, when pasting text into a Scratchpad from software like Microsoft Word it is not formatted as expected. There are often extra line breaks, in what appear to be random places, through the text. This is due to the presence of unseen additional line breaks in the pasted text. A feature called 'Line break converter' converts these line breaks into HTML (i.e. <br> and <p> tags), resulting in the 'broken' formatting.

Example: Let's assume you disable your rich-text editor and type in:

"First paragraph.

Second paragraph."

If you now enable the rich text editor again your text will look the same, because of the line break converter. If you had disabled the line break converter, your text would now be:

"First paragraph. Second paragraph."

So this feature is a help for people who enter plain text but want it to look the same in html.

We have tried to disable the line break converter for all sites, but this generates problems on several sites because paragraphs that are supposed to be there are suddenly missing. This happens depending on how you have entered your data. So we can't do this for all sites. What we CAN now do is change this setting on individual sites.

If you would like us to disable the line break converter on your site please contact us. We can create a copy of your site on which to test this, so that if there are problems they will not affect your proper site.

Participants: Edward Baker, Vladimir Blagoderov, Irina Brake, Laurence Livermore, David Roberts, Simon Rycroft, Ben Scott, Vince Smith

Please see the attached pdf for a list of current and future Scratchpad features.

We make a backup of all Scratchpads each day (during the night), each week, and each month. If anything goes wrong, we can restore a Scratchpad with the daily backup from the last five weeks, the weekly backup from the last five months or the monthly backup from the last five years.

Between June 15th and June 22nd the Scratchpads were periodically offline, and even when online, were not very responsive.

This down-time was due to a memory misconfiguration of the server we are using. The Scratchpad server runs as a virtual machine instance (specifically VMWare/vSphere) along with a number of other virtual machines on a server at the Natural History Museum (NHM). The server had been configured with 16GB of ram, of which only 6GB was physical memory, the other 10GB was made up of virtual memory. This was something the Scratchpad team were not aware of, so we had configured the server to make use of all 16GB of ram we thought we had. The virtual machine has now been allocated 16GB of physical memory resolving the down-time we were having, and also giving a performance improvement.

Please accept our sincerest apologies for this down-time, and rest assured that we are working with the NHM's IT team to ensure that this will not happen again.

Participants: Ed Baker, Vladimir Blagoderov, Irina Brake, Simon Rycroft, Ben Scott, Vince Smith 

The ViBRANT project has launched its new Scratchpad Ambassador program and is recruiting users to be the official local representative of the Scratchpad community, linking the Scratchpad team with Scratchpads' growing user base.

If you are a Scratchpad maintainer or user and you are enthusiastic about Scratchpads and would like to spread the word about Scratchpads in your institution and/or your research community then here’s your chance! Become a Scratchpad Ambassador!