I scribble notes on a pad when I conduct interviews for my business. I don’t write many words because I’m trying to understand what people are saying and can’t write and think at the same time. (Half-Polish, can’t chew gum either). My notes are becoming more difficult to reread after a period of time too because my handwriting skills have diminished. Except for my grocery shopping list, I rarely use paper Post Its anymore, preferring electronic versions that are available on most newer PCs and phones. Like most people with Smart phones, I take out mine out frequently so see the reminders often. So this approach works well for me. I do have a paper scribble pad (recycled paper!) that I use every day with a pencil to capture transient bits of information that I use during the day. I throw out the scribbles next day and start a new sheet. This is still more efficient and convenient than a computer based approach.

The way that we read information to acquire knowledge has been gradually transforming. Before electronics, brief communication of information (today’s tweets, text messages or emails) was commonly done via oral interaction or sign images like smoke signals, semaphores, etc. The telegraph and telephone replaced these and has broadened the potential audience. Global electronic networks are the phase that we are in now. These kinds of communications usually only convey relatively small bits of information or knowledge. Think about trying to get a university degree by only reading tweets and text messages. That’s not going to get it done.

The applicability of collaborative space has been spotty. There are some specific successes, but in general this idea has not expanded significantly over the past 20 years. Remember Lotus Notes?

Conveying more complex concepts and ideas, requires a much more structured use of many words than these communication vehicles can easily provide. Most people scan through pages bought up by web search results looking for key words of phrases. They rarely read a page word by word.

So what’s the best medium to read a book or long document? I can tolerate reading no more than 3 pages max word for word on my PC screen. Some days, like today, it’s less than one page. It’s the screen angle and overall brightness that gets to me. You can carry around and tilt paper pages, books and eReaders to accommodate your sitting or standing position. Also, most eReaders have the capability of increasing font size which I often do when my eyes get tired at the end of a day. They also are not overly bright, but have good black/white contrast. Most models can’t be read in the dark. I often print a few pages of information to read and then reuse the paper for scribbling. I don’t keep the printed sheets for very long.

I print fewer items to read than I did last year and think that this is because I am scanning, skimming speed reading more. Everyone seems to be doing this and I’m not sure whether it is good or bad. Are we learning less and just recycling information more?

When paper was king, I read many articles and books word for word then composed my original work. I’m sure I plagiarized some things without giving credit to the proper author, but I (as do many university professors) are seeing many articles, blogs and white papers that are primarily information that has been cut and pasted from other sources and advertised as “original” work.

I think that we have to be more selective in the use of our time to acquire new knowledge. Texting, tweeting, information skimming, social networking and other activities can take away too many hours every day and inhibit our capability to compose original ideas.

Electronic Lab Notebooks / Lab Information Management Systems
Labtronics Inc. has released a Connector for Nexxis ELN that allows the Electronic Laboratory Notebook to connect to any LIMS.
Nexxis ELN makes use of the industry standard integration tool, LimsLink, to provide direct connection with any LIMS. The connection provides bi-directional connectivity allowing the Electronic Notebook to retrieve sample lists from LIMS and report results back to LIMS

In my opinion, there are two different sets of requirements that emerge from a progressively maturing marketplace. Most of the meetings held by commercial conference organisers tend to be based on a business model that is aimed at serving vendors’ interests by targeting prospects. The technical programme focuses on case studies and broader, state of the industry/technology-type content. In the laboratory world, we’ve seen these conferences become well established in the LIMS and ELN domains. However, the International LIMS Conferences disappeared some years ago. It may be just a matter of time before a similar fate awaits the ELN conferences.

Over time, and as more delegates progress from being prospects to becoming users, the requirements change. In time, a ‘user’ community emerges whose interests are directed not so much towards the purchasing process, but more towards business and technology trends. As a consequence the requirement for the content of a conference has a different focus; you could say the emphasis shifts from the past (this is how we did it, or this is how to do it), to the future (what’s coming next, what will it mean, and how will we cope).

This changing interest requires a different model with less emphasis on sales and marketing, and more on emerging or evolving business and technology strategies and trends. To a limited extent, this can be, and is, addressed through the online community. Blogs and discussion groups can deal with this up to a point, despite the restrictions of sharing opinion on-line when you are an employee. But there’s a good number of people who believe that face-to-face meetings are an ideal compliment to on-line communication, and this perhaps explains why there is a sense of frustration that this need is not being met very well at the moment. The challenge for the commercial conference organisers is whether they can evolve a successful business model to address this changing need. In the early part of the life cycle of the big LIMS and ELN conferences, delegates had more questions than answers. When there are more answers than questions, its time to move on.

Just this past week, one of the software vendor’s consultants at my customer was sitting around thinking and suddenly turned to me and said, “You know, I bet there are some great uses for the iPad in a laboratory” to which I immediately replied, “Yes, it’s a great sample tray!,”and then I snickered. I just can’t stop perpetuating that joke. I guess that shows the inane level my sense of humor dives to.

But I might have to stop this silliness. In the LIMS/Laboratory Informatics group in LinkedIn, I just saw the title “The iPad Makes its Way Into the Research Lab” to which I struggled but did hold-off making a post just to point-back to John’s “sample tray” posting ( http://www.linkedin.com/newsArticle?viewDiscussion=&articleID=136348746&gid=36640 ).

And, to make things yet more serious, there’s a real application really using the iPad ( http://blog.biodata.com/2010/06/13/the-ipad-makes-its-way-into-the-research-lab/ ).

Also, to be fair to John, he did also make another posting about the iPad where he did not use the term “sample tray” anywhere (drat!) (http://theintegratedlab.com/2010/05/the-ipad-in-the-laboratory/ ).

And so, as we get new technologies, there is usually eventually someone that discovers a great use for it. And, when that doesn’t happen, the technology doesn’t take off and disappears from our horizon, regardless how “cool” we might have thought it was when it came out.

Well, last week I managed to lay hands on an iPad for the first time, albeit only for a few minutes, but it was enough to create some initial thoughts about the potential (or otherwise) of the device in the laboratory. My initial reaction was one of familiarity; as an iPhone user the interface and interactions were very familiar, although seeing Apple software such as iWorks installed was a reminder that this is a different device. By and large the experience was very similar to using an iPhone, but on a grander scale. The success of the iPhone, and the iPod, have been dependent on a couple of key factors; firstly they just look cool (but acknowledging that beauty is in the eye of the beholder!), and secondly they offer a ‘solution’ rather than just a device. The nature of the dedicated ‘Apps’ approach, and the associated service through iTunes just makes life easy when it comes to finding and installing applications. In order to make the iPad a success in the laboratory, just porting an application or running it in a browser will probably not be enough; it will need a tailored application that takes full advantage of the specific features of the device.

The other thing that struck me was the form factor. Falling between a laptop and a mobile phone in size, it is quite portable, but with Apple’s characteristic smooth finish, it feels a bit slippery and needs to be handled carefully. Furthermore, it falls somewhere between a laptop and a mobile phone in ease of use. A laptop needs to be placed on a reasonably firm surface (a lap?) to making typing manageable. An iPhone can be held comfortably in one hand, while you swipe and prod with the other. In principle, it is the same with an iPad, but the size of the device makes it a bit of a handful, and I would imagine that any serious typing would require the iPad to be laid on a surface. However, in the world of pens and paper we learned to handle clipboards, so I suppose we’ll figure a way to cope with an iPad for some rudimentary input. What did strike me was the convenience of the device for reading, and here it was rather like carrying/holding a thin book, somewhat less intrusive than a laptop, but with a decent size screen, a far more convenient size for reading than a phone. I suspect the accessories market will be looking to exploit opportunities around handling and protecting the iPad to get around some of the minor inconveniences.

So overall, does that make the iPad a potential replacement for a paper lab notebook? Time will tell; if suitable applications are tailored for the device; if the form factor is not a restriction; if the ‘closed’ or controlling nature of Apple’s approach to applications is not a hinderance, and if corporate IT policies will accommodate this type of device, well then, maybe…….

But getting back to the point, locating computers in the laboratory is not new; we’ve been doing it for 40 years or so, and its getting easier. Flat screens, mounted on telescopic arms, membrane keyboards, on slide-away trays, and use of KVM devices to switch the desk-bound processor between use at the desk or in the lab, have all helped. Of course this doesn’t overcome the basic mobility of a paper notebook, and it remains to be seen whether mobile electronic devices will have any impact on laboratory work. Already there are ELNs that are iPad-ready; there’s a major LIMS vendor that has been advertising for some while, a LIMS running on an iPhone. It is possible that these mobile devices may offer the possibility of capturing data, notes and ideas that can be synced back to a laboratory system so that the chore of sitting down and fully documenting an experiment can be conducted in an office environment.

But what if…..we were to use multimedia, rather than just text and images, to record experiments, or if the laboratory became a ‘Minority Report’ example of ubiquitous computing???? It may be some way away, but I suspect its not the ELN that is doomed.

The other news item appeared on the BBC website: ‘MI5 staff who lack computer skills made redundant’. (MI5 is the UK counter-intelligence service). In a round of compulsory and voluntary redundancies, MI5 staff lacking IT skills are being told that they are not wanted. Counter-terrorism is increasingly dependent on technology and officers have to adapt to keep up and to be completely comfortable using computers and the latest technology. This would never happen in a laboratory, would it?

I’m reminded of an unsubstantiated story from a few years ago, of a company that chose to implement an ELN by equipping their scientists with tablet devices, but were dismayed to find that the tablet proved to be a convenient tray for carrying samples around the laboratory. Apart from a smaller form factor, the typical Apple glossy surface and the lack of a protective rim, the iPad is unlikely to become a laboratory tray purely on safety grounds.

All three posts serve as a timely reminder that there are basic skills in some of the processes that we try to automate or computerise, and no amount of slick software can replace that. But there were a few other points in the blog posts that could raise eyebrows. I’m totally impressed by Tim Ferriss’ organisational skills and habits with paper notebooks, but there’s a lot of us who aren’t in his league. And when it comes to any requirement for sharing….I have to conclude that Tim’s notebooks are for his eyes only.

The other point that caught my attention was in Jill Hubbard Bowman’s post, which contains some great advice on recording and maintaining intellectual property; Jill made the point that ‘Courts don’t trust electronic documents’. Well, this seems to run contradictory to a lot of the advice Lawyers and Patent Attorneys are passing on in organisations where paper lab notebooks are being replaced with electronic lab notebooks. Since courts make decisions based on evidence, it is the relevance, integrity and authenticity of the evidence, not the medium, that determine trustworthiness. Of course, the approach with digital records is different to that with paper records, but courts in the US and Western Europe are quite comfortable with electronic records, to the extent that most major pharmaceutical companies have switched to fully electronic records for their scientific IP. But it does mean that a robust and reliable process for managing electronic records, able to stand up to the court’s scrutiny, is essential. This throws a lot of emphasis on the underlying process; so the advice given in Jill’s post is very valid.

Here’s a couple of links to relevant posts on this site:
Good Laboratory Notebook Practice
Legal Issues of ELNs

The LIMS market has reached a sufficient level of maturity that (I suspect) we all know what a LIMS is, and what it does. The same is not true for ELNs. For most people, an ELN is far more than a replacement for the paper lab notebook; it needs to provide the generic capability that the paper notebook provides, but it also needs to replace the traditional cut and paste (scissors and tape) with sophisticated electronic interfaces to other laboratory systems and processes that serve specific laboratory disciplines such as chemistry, biology and analytical or Q/A. As such, the authoring tool at the hub of an “ELN’ is the equivalent of the paper lab notebook, and everything else becomes a number of integration challenges that collectively represent an electronic, or integrated lab.

One of these integration challenges is of course the LIMS, and for most organisations an interface between the LIMS and the ELN is a key requirement. The LIMS does all of the sample and test management, based around structured data; the ELN handles the unstructured and discipline-specific data. But the ELN market became a bit fuzzy with a small number of products (QA-ELNs) that were labelled as ELNs, but functionally were closer to a LIMS, albeit with a different type of workflow. The products were essentially built around an SOP-driven workflow that presented the user with the test procedure. Test results could then be added to the appropriate fields in the procedure, either manually, or by a direct instrument interface. Of course, a more typical ELN could be configured with templates that are able to replicate this type of workflow, so one of the impacts of the specialised QA-ELNs was to cause the mainstream ELN vendors to respond with this type of functionality. Having kept very much in the background, suddenly the LIMS vendors, saw the opportunity to extend their products to embrace the QA-style workflow by adding a layer of functionality to provide either a procedural driven approach, or to accommodate the unstructured data that is associated with an experiment.

The outcome then is, if you are looking for a QA-ELN, there are three options; firstly to go with a specialised ELN dedicated to QA, secondly choose a mainstream ELN that offers a QA module, or thirdly choose a LIMS with ELN functionality. There’s no easy answer to this since your organisation’s specific requirements and existing infrastructure will have a big influence, but…..

If you do not already have a LIMS or an ELN, and compliance is a big issue for you, you will probably want to look at the specialised QA-ELNs. If you need to accommodate multiple disciplines in your ELN (chemistry, biology, QA, etc) then the mainstream vendors that offer a product with discipline-specific modules may be your first port of call. And if you already are a customer of a LIMS vendor who is now offering an ELN extension, then their systems may be the first to check out.

But perhaps the real issue here is our application-centric view of laboratory systems. The move by ELN vendors and LIMS vendors to offer a suite of functionality that operates on a single platform makes good sense. And if the platform were not proprietary, then it would make even better sense.

The course presented at SmartLabs Exchange outlined a systemic approach to automation, tracing its evolution from the days when quantitative chromatography was based on cutting out peaks and weighing them, to current requirements for integrating disparate laboratory instruments, systems and robotics into a unified laboratory ‘solution’. Considerable emphasis was placed on process and workflow understanding, the choice of technology infrastructure and the role that systems such as LIMS and ELNs can play in facilitating integration. From a manager’s perspective, the introduction of laboratory automation is equivalent to introducing a small scale ‘scientific manufacturing’ operation and therefore warrants appropriate policies and practices. Good planning plays a critical role in the deployment of laboratory automation, based on well-defined goals and business justification.

The course provided an excellent overview of strategic approach to laboratory automation. Full details of the public course schedule offered by the Institute for Laboratory Automation can be found here.

With regard to the technical content of the meeting, one of the underlying themes was the continuing debate about the overlap between LIMS and the growing number of ‘Q/A ELNs’. Presentations from LabWare, Velquest, LabVantage and Waters tackled this issue head-on. It is interesting to note that after staying away from the ELN market for some years, a number of LIMS vendors are now adding ELN functionality to their products to move into this market space. The underlying strategy seems to be one of offering existing (LIMS) customers the ability to extend their implementations by adding ELN functionality, rather than purchasing a separate ELN system and facing the subsequent interfacing issue. This approach has its strengths and weaknesses which I’ll look into in another post.

For the first time in one of these meetings I sat through a workshop on Software as a Service(SaaS). SaaS is currently in the hype cycle when it comes to laboratory systems. But with an increasing number of commercial offerings and some potentially significant benefits to customers, it is becoming increasingly important to get some clarity around the benefits and limitations.

Laboratory automation, as an ‘engineering’ function, got a good exposure, and I’ll put together a separate post or two on this topic. The concern is that there is very little formal education that specifically addresses this topic, despite the fact that it represents a significant challenge for most laboratories.

My participation included a workshop on the subject of ‘Managing User Resistance’; here’s my slides.

Overall this was a good and enjoyable meeting and a refreshing change from the more passive style of conference that serves the laboratory integration market.