Scratchpad Training Courses
The courses are intended to help current and prospective Scratchpad owners develop their site building skills. You will be given the opportunity to learn best practice and gain a better understanding of what the Scratchpads can do for you and your research community. The focus of the basic course lies on adding various kinds of data, on generating taxon pages and on communication with other users. Our goal is to provide a taste of what the sites can do, and allow you to independently explore the site after the event. The focus of the advanced course lies on the import of data, creating of custom content types and views, and managing of projects (groups).
The Scratchpad team is planning the following training courses in 2010:
- Natural History Museum, London, 19. April 2010, basic training course
- Natural History Museum, London, 20. April 2010, advanced training course
- 7th International Congress of Dipterology (ICD7), San José, Costa Rica, 8-13. August 2010, basic training course
- 5th International Conference on Fossil Insects, Arthropods and Amber, FOSSILX3, Beijing, China, 20-25. August 2010, basic training course
- Natural History Museum, London, October/November, date to be ascertained
- Fourth International Congress on Phthiraptera (ICP4), Cappadocia, Turkey, 13-18. June 2010, training for contributors to http://phthiraptera.myspecies.info/
Application
Places on these courses will be limited to about 8-12 so that participants can get individual attention. Applications will therefore be screened using the following criteria:
- to get as many institutions represented as possible, we will default to one participant per institution (except for NHM internal courses);
- to those who are already managing a Scratchpad or say that they intend to do so: we expect some familiarity before the course starts;
- some level of IT competence, so that the concepts we're discussing are not new to the participants;
- those who are registered with the associated conference.
Training manuals and other training files are available for self training if you don't have the opportunity to participate in a course.




