Scratchpads: biodiversity online

Scratchpads: Biodiversity Online is an online biodiversity site (duh) that looks very promising. From their website:

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		Phylogenies
	Bibliographies		Documents
	Image galleries		Custom data
	Specimen records		Maps

Users control who has access to content, which is published on the site under Creative Commons (by-nc-sa) license.

Data added to a Scratchpad are automatically classified and grouped around a taxonomy that is supplied by the users. This is optionally supplemented with information from high quality web accessible databases, to automatic construct content rich web pages about any documented taxon. Currently these sources include Genbank, GBIF, Biodiversity Heritage Library, Yahoo! Images, flickr and Google Scholar.

Want to learn more? I do!

• Roberts, D., Rycroft, S.D., González, M., and Smith, V.S. (2007) Scratchpads: what are they? European Distributed Institute of Taxonomy News (newsletter article).
  



• Smith, VS.* (2008) Cybertaxonomy: applying computers & the Web to the study of biodiversity. Invited. Part of the Voyages of Discovery lecture series. Natural History Museum, London, U.K. April 22, 2008.
  



• Smith, VS.*, Rycroft, S.D. & Roberts, D. (2008) Scratchpads: Getting biodiversity online, redefining publication. Invited. NHM trustees presentation. Natural History Museum, London, U.K. March 4, 2008.
  



• Smith, VS.*, Rycroft, S.D., & Roberts, D. (2008) Scratchpads: Getting biodiversity online, redefining publication. EDIT general meeting, Carvoeiro, Portugal. Jan. 24, 2008.