Scratchpad update, 12 February 2010
- On 5th February we had one of our Scratchpad team meetings. We went through the list of requests and issues raised during our Scratchpad survey last year. One request raised by many participants was the need to make the Scratchpads easier and more intuitive to use. So we are now trying to improve the workflow and the help. You might have noticed that the taskguide has changed to reflect the actual workflow better, and there are more changes coming.
- In connection with the current year of biodiversity we also decided to put a 'species of the week' on the frontpage of scratchpads.eu. These 'species of the week' will be species pages from various Scratchpads containing actual content. In due course you will receive an email asking you to participate with your species pages.
- On the 8th February, Vince Smith, Dave Roberts and Simon Rycroft went to Brussels for a hearing on the ViBRANT proposal, which is a big EU grant which, among other things will help us to continue and extend our Scratchpad work. We are proud to have reached this stage of the evaluation process and hope our proposal will be successful.
- On 11-12th February we held a meeting at the NHM on how to publish articles containing new species descriptions from the Scratchpads in ZooKeys. The meeting included discussion of the workflow, the XML document needed, the content of the first paper thus produced, and a short training session for the contributors involved.
- The manual for the basic training course was adapted so that we now have another manual for contributors and editors of Scratchpads, which they can work through on their own.
