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This is a brief list of the more interesting features of the Marginalia web annotation system. These apply both to the Moodle and stand-alone versions:

• Users can highlight arbitrary passages of HTML text. This highlighting can cross element boundaries, e.g. starting in a hyperlink and ending outside it, or starting in one paragraph and ending in another.
• Annotations are displayed in the margin adjacent to the associated highlighted text. This display adapts to arrange annotation reasonably if they are too many or too long.
• Annotations can overlap each other.
• To distinguish which note corresponds to which highlighted passage, both light up when either is under the mouse cursor. if a passage of text corresponds to more than one note, both light up.
• Each annotation is associated with a specific user name. The user can toggle each between public and private states. This feature is only useful when integrated with another system, such as Moodle.
• Readers can use annotations to associate hyperlinks with passages in the text.
• Annotations can be entered as free-form text and/or by selecting from a list of predefined terms.
• Full support for Firefox and Internet Explorer (although the Firefox version looks and works better).
• Smartcopy (for Firefox only): when a user copies from a document and pastes elsewhere, context information about the source document is automatically included.
• Annotations are available from the server in Atom syndication format.

In addition, the Moodle implementation includes the following features:

• A summary page in Moodle displays all annotations for a discussion, along with links to the discussion, the author of the annotated post, and the passage of highlighted text.
• The summary page can display all annotations for the current user, or all public annotations, including those of other users.
• The summary page includes a full-text search of annotation quotes, notes, message titles, and author names.
• If an annotated post changes, it may not be possible for the software to determine where annotations should be displayed. Moodle warns of the problem, and the annotations remain avialable on the summary page.
• Smartcopy for Moodle messages includes the message title, author, and date.

The OJS implementation adds some other features:

• The link associated with an annotation can point to an individual paragraphs in another journal article on the same OJS site. Links can be created without cutting and pasting by simply clicking on the target paragraph in a browser window.
• Annotations by multiple other users can be retrieved for a particular paragraph by clicking on the paragraph (the server can calculate which annotations overlap the point or paragraph clicked without reference to the annotated document).

I would like to thank BC Campus for funding this effort, and for allowing its release under the GNU General Public License, and to Simon Fraser University for their support of the project through Dr. Andrew Feenberg's Applied Communication and Technology Lab in the School of Communication and through the Learning and Instructional Development Centre. Open Journal Systems support and additional features 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. The UNDESA "Africa i-Parliaments Action Plan" project provided support for edit actions, the per-paragraph multiuser support, and a number of other improvements.