Marginalia Library Readme

This is the Marginalia client-side annotation library. When integrated with a web application, it allows users to highlight passages of text and create margin notes. You can find a stand-alone demo and other resources on the Marginalia web site.

This library is not a working application. It is missing essential functions and other parts of the implementation (such as the server side), including localization, the database specification, some callbacks, configuration options, etc. It is a separate project to make it a straightforward drop-in library for use in multiple host applications.

If you want to test out Marginalia, you must connect it to a web application. The Marginalia demo application is the simplest candidate. Developers may also find other implementations with real-world applications helpful - such as OJS for the clarity of its integration, and Moodle for some of its additional features (e.g. searchable annotations and more sophisticated user permissions).

License & Funding

I want to particularly thank BC Campus for funding this effort, and for allowing its release under the GNU General Public License, and to Simon Fraser University through Dr. Andrew Feenberg's Applied Communication and Technology Lab in the School of Communication and through the Learning and Instructional Development Centre for their financial support. Malaspina University-College has also been supportive, as they provided a test site for Marginalia for Moodle.

Open Journal Systems support and other improvements to Marginalia were made possible by Dr. Rick Kopak's "Navigating Information Spaces" project at the University of British Columbia, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Chia-ning Chiang and John Willinsky have also been essential in getting this project off the ground.

Unless otherwise noted, the code is Copyright (c) 2005-2007 Geoffrey Glass.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

Limitations and Known Bugs

I am aware of several limitations with the software:

• This version has only been tested with Firefox. IE support is likely broken for the moment. Other browsers may work if and when they support relevant web standards. Note that I did develop IE support; I simply haven't had the time to keep it up-to-date with the most recent improvements to the system. Fixing it should be a matter of a bit of (painful) debugging.
• I have only tried annotation with a MySQL database. It's possible there are incompatibilities with others (e.g. Postgres).
• Marginalia is incompatible with the Firefox "Auto Copy" extension if the extension is set to automatically clear the selection once it has been copied (this can be modified with the "Auto Copy" preferences).