The rise of Electronic Lab Notebooks as an essential tool in the laboratory has occurred in the same time frame as the rise of social network tools for collaboration and sharing outside of the laboratory. Industry is increasingly taking note of the potential of social tools to support ‘knowledge management’ initiatives. At the same time, industrial laboratories are converting from traditional paper lab notebooks to the electronic variety to support scientific collaboration and sharing (scientific knowledge management). Academia, of course, has similar requirements, but without the financial clout (or the inclination?) to purchase and implement fully functional, commercial ELNs. One of the outcomes of this situation is the adoption of social tools in academic labs for experiment write-ups. There’s little doubt that some of the requirements of industry and academia are different, although the gap is probably considerably less than it was some years ago, and with the increasing number of collaborations between the two domains, it is likely to reduce further. So it makes interesting reading to hear some of the innovative approaches to adopting ELNs in the academic world, and to consider whether there may be implications or learnings for industry.
Here’s a few examples: Steve Easterbrook, a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto discusses the use of wiki pages as a notebook, in his Serendipity blog. Dave Lunt, a Lecturer in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Hull (UK) talks about the use of WordPress on EvoPhylo. Philip Johnson, a PhD student at the University of Toronto has written about semi-digital lab notebooks, and an earlier post, digital lab notebooks, generated a number of interesting comments. The Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University offers a brief overview of matters relating to laboratory notebooks, despite some non-working links. Shawn McLelland from the Neuroscience Department at UC Irvine has a website, e-Lab-book.com (The quest for the electronic lab notebook). Cameron Naylor from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), the UK’s major provider and supporter of large scale academic research facilities, discusses ‘the integrated lab record or the web native lab notebook’ in his blog on Science in the Open. Also on Science in the Open is a two part article on the Southampton E-Lab Blog Notebook: Part 1 Aims; Part 2 ELN Strategy.
