Over the course of this year, we’ve been working towards making Scratchpads a more stable service. As this work is coming close to fruition we wanted to give you an update on recent improvements, the impending move to a new server architecture, and our future development plans.

Due to planned technical maintenance of the Natural History Museum London servers, NHM-hosted Scratchpads will be offline between 17:30 and 18:00 (GMT) on Monday 13th August 2018.

Notice: Due to ongoing network issues the Scratchpads may be intermittently available and/or slow to respond to requests. We are looking into the issues at the moment.

We are very pleased to announce the Natural History Museum’s Informatics Group has hired two developers to help support the Scratchpads project. Ben Scott (who was instrumental in building versions 1 and 2 of Scratchpads) has been rehired as Informatics Group Technical Lead, after running the Museum’s Data Portal project and a stint at Exeter University’s Innovation Lab. He is joined by Paul Kiddle who has many years development experience in the Biotech world, for startups including Desktop Genetics.

Due to planned technical maintenance of the Natural History Museum London servers, all NHM-hosted Scratchpads will be offline between 9:00 and 13:00 (GMT) on Wednesday 28th February 2018.

for reasons related to our current technical and support capacity we will not be able to temporarily accept applications for creating new Scratchpads sites.

Users report problems with the automatic authentication in the Scratchpads Issues tracker (support.scratchpads.eu). If you experience similar difficulties, please do use the e-mail address scratchpads@nhm.ac.uk and until we fully address the underlying cause. We apologise for the inconvenience.

Unfortunately, our (NHM) servers scheduled maintenance overran the expected duration. Scratchpads remained inaccessible from 19.00 Nov 09 to 10.00 Nov 10 (GMT). All services are now back up and running. No additional downtime is expected.

18.30 and 22.00 (GMT) on Monday 09 November 2015

Liew Thor-Seng is our new Ambassador from Borneo, Malaysia