I did give Dragon Naturally Speaking software a shot. Wasn’t that bad to get started, but since my composing style involves many rewrites, edits and redos, it was too clunky for me to use routinely. And there were days when I mumbled more than usual. Dragon could not translate my mumbles very well. I always thought it would be an excellent tool for medical writers or other people whose prose is more predictable..

Other than typing letters and symbols, do you use any of the other keys to help productivity? Let’s get back to that in a sec. What kind of mouse do you like to use? I find that people are very fussy about their preferences; track ball, joy stick, touch pad, eraser stick, and click and scroll mice to name a few. I’ve found that none of them are as good or fast as my finger navigation. But double clicking or right clicking your finger is a challenge for most devices. The iPad is not a device that is good for most business processes, although I’m sure there are a bunch of people out there who are “making” it work.

I’ve been using laptops for the past 20 years or so and when traveling I have had “mouse” failure at least twice. The first time was traumatic. It took me forever to do things, but by trial and error I did figure how to do some “mouse things” via my keyboard. When I got home, I did a little more research and discovered that it is possible to go almost completely “mouseless”. There are actually more key commands out there than you would ever want or need. I tried a bunch of them and eventually settled on several that I continue to use today in concert with my mouse. Like touching finger to the screen, there are some things that are way easier to do with a keystroke.

These are my favorites, (sorry to the MAC users), starting with the ones I use the most. There are many other keyboard shortcuts, but unless you hate mice (or rats) they don’t add much,
Windows logo key +E = Open computer Explorer

Windows logo key +M = Minimize all windows

F12 opens the Save as window in Microsoft Office apps.

F5 Refreshes current browser page, frame, or tab.

Ctrl + A = Select all text.

Ctrl + X = Cut selected item.

Ctrl + C = Copy selected item.

Ctrl + V = Paste

Alt + F4 Closes Current open program.

Shift + F3 will change the text in Microsoft Word from upper to lower case or a capital letter at the beginning of every word. (This is great after you discover your been typing away with the CapsLk on).

F5 Starts a slideshow in PowerPoint.

B displays a black screen during a PowerPoint presentation (great for getting your audience’s attention!). Hit B again to resume. Try using W if you are a bright person.

I hope that I pressed some of your buttons.

Workshare released Workshare Point, software which enables users to retrieve and file content to Microsoft SharePoint without leaving Microsoft Office applications. The Workshare Point solution provides a tight integration between the Office products and SharePoint, so users may access SharePoint quickly and easily from within the familiar Office and Outlook navigation interfaces.

OpenText Corporation announced portal solutions that enable customers to create best in class social-, content- and customer-centric sites. The new OpenText Portal software includes a set of powerful portlets that allow users to easily mashup content from Microsoft SharePoint, OpenText ECM Suite and many other sources into a single, highly flexible and personalized interface, for intranet, extranet, or customer-facing websites.
Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 isthat platform with open standards like CMIS, JSR-168 and RESTful API’s manages content and expose repository functionality inside of social business systems.Alfresco’s refreshed Share interface for collaboration and document management now includes status updates (similar to Facebook and Twitter), content activity streams and enhanced search capabilities to make content easier to find.

SpringCM, unveiled new cloud enterprise content management platform.The new cloud enterprise content management platform features enhanced e-forms and metadata functionality that enable easier and faster deployment of SpringCM for process-automation, workflow and document-management applications.

For the past 20 years or so, most people have been composing and finalizing their own documents, rather than delegating it to a secretary/typist. There are still a few people around who rely on a secretary or admin, but most higher level people in an organization compose and finalize their own documents these days. I had a friend that was recently sitting next to a man on an airplane who was reading s sheaf of printed email messages and making notations on them with a pencil, presumably to give to an admin to reply to the sender. This is a dying breed.

So who is the custodian of the records that need to be shared with others in an organization? If the files are kept on a share drive or partially developed SharePoint location (it often seems like most are partially developed!), this responsibility often falls to an admin who becomes the custodian responsible for the records of a lot of people. That’s one scenario. If an organization had implemented some kind of working content management system, chances are that a custodian has been defined for certain types of records (regulatory) and other types are left to personal whim. The inevitable result of these practices is chaos when personnel changes occur.

The new custodian will probably be thrust into an active role because of pending litigation or some updated contractual agreement. They will probably be baffled by the filing “system” that their predecessor used and will normally continue with it, adding new record categories to the prior ones. The next custodian will thereby inherit an archive that is doubly confusing.

How do you fix this? It’s actually pretty simple and there are benefits other than knowing where vital records are stored. Develop a records retention file plan that groups records having the same retention times into a small number of folders. Start simple. You can always expand the categories later. The records plan should be agreed and understood by all who are contributing to this repository. The only other thing that needs to be added at the end of every year is an additional subfolder identifying records belonging to the new year. That’s it! Not rocket science. New contributors’ are trained by the custodian on the logic of the system. When a record is due for destruction approval, it is easily located because of the yearly subfolders. This is a poor man’s record management software. Filing information by year works great. You all should do this for your personal records too. Keeps things from getting clogged up with outdated information.

A2iA, developer of tools for handwritten and machine-printed text recognition, data extraction, and the intelligent classification of paper documents, announced that A2iA FieldReader(tm), its proprietary toolkit designed for extracting information from structured and semi-structured forms, has been integrated into BOLT Document Management’s Bolt Script. Bolt Script, a software add-on that enables Laserfiche(r) ECM users to incorporate handwritten documents into their workflow, can be applied to a multitude of verticals including banking, finance, healthcare, insurance, government, manufacturing, education and utilities.

Ricoh Americas Corporation announced the launch of the next generation of its Personal Paperless Document Manager (PPDMv2). Equipped with more robust and dynamic features, PPDMv2 software converts scanned paper documents into electronic files and routes them to any destination via custom workflows created from a desktop computer. PPDMv2 can accommodate Ricoh, Savin and Lanier branded products.

OpenText announced it had entered into an agreement to merge Metastorm, the Baltimore-based provider of business process management, business process analysis, and enterprise architecture software, with a subsidiary of OpenText. MetaStorm’s document-centric workflow technology makes it a logical acquisition for Open Text, and both companies target document-heavy industries such as the legal sector.

AnIML is an emerging and open data standard, maintained by the ASTM E13.15 sub-committeee on analytical data. The XML-based standard is independent of measurement technique, and supports the sharing and storing of analytical data. AnIML consists of a core data container that includes sample, method, instrument and software information plus measurement results. Extensions to this generic container facilitate the application of the standard to any established technique (chromatography, spectroscopy, etc.) as well as custom or one-off experiments.

Now, data standards in themselves aren’t really that exciting; it is the opportunities that they create that should get us really interested. So what does AnIML offer? Data interchange is an obvious benefit; the ability to transfer data, analyse it, view it, manipulate it, re-process it, independently of proprietary software and vendor lock-in represents a an unprecedented degree of freedom. But the less obvious benefit is the ability to archive data in a human-readable format over the long term. Moving to open, rather than proprietary formats has a multitude of other benefits as well, such as cross-technique data mining, data publication, LIMS and ELN integration, and other forms of result delivery.

I was also able to see a demonstration of the Seahorse Scientific Workbench from BBSN. At this point it is important to stress that theintegratedlab.com is an independent website that does not support the promotion of products or services, and my comments on the Seahorse Scientific Workbench represent a strategic view of a different product concept.

The Seahorse Scientific Workbench is an open and extensible ‘platform’, or software suite, that provides a number of data management and manipulation facilities for analytical data based on the AnIML standard. It offers a workflow driven approach that can complement, or offer an alternative to, other laboratory applications.

Without getting into the detail of the workbench, perhaps the two things that struck me most were:

1. An open-based approach starts to offer realistic alternatives to established proprietary systems to meet the demand for data interchange, sharing, collaboration and long-term data preservation.
2. The ‘workbench’ concept creates an opportunity to adopt a more modular approach to laboratory computing. For example, at the core of an ELN is an authoring tool that provides the capability to create a compound document. Most of us already have tools with this capability on our desktops. But almost every ELN installation will require integration with other laboratory tools, hence the range of highly functional, commercial products in the market place, that allow integration with chemistry, biology and analytical systems. If a modular, workflow-based ‘workbench’ facilitates the integration of other laboratory systems, then it offers an alternative approach to the traditional ‘application-centric’ approach that most laboratories adopt. This may not, of course, suit some organisations, but can offer a viable alternative to a typical data acquisition/LIMS/ELN configuration.

I will be conducting a podcast interview with Burkhard Schaefer ahead of two upcoming European conferences, at which he will be talking about AnIML. So those of you who were unable to take advantage of a trip to the sunshine and warm temperatures of Palm Springs can catch up at the SmartLabs Exchange in Berlin, Feb 28 – Mar 2, and Laboratory Information Management in Amsterdam, 23-25 May.

Many times we think that as long as we dump a file into a thoughtfully named folder, we don’t really have to spend a lot of time naming it. I guess that’s OK for files that have a low probability of reuse. However, if you do need to find them again in a folder that contains a few hundred other files, it may be difficult to locate.

I support a well planned system of nested folders, however it is rare to see an effective system within a community of users. File names in shared directories often range from an elaborate alpha number code to jargon that is only understandable by a segment of the community. Folder names should contain logical terms that anyone would use, now or in the future to find information.

I know that some of you have access to search engines that will index all of the words in your documents making it easier to find things. As an aside, the Windows 7 search utility is not that reliable. I gave it a concerted try about a year ago and gave up on it. It was very inconsistent for large dynamic collections of files. Of course if you have access to content management software you can add metadata values to your file to facilitate retrieval.

Let’s just focus on file names, because even with good content and folder management they will help clarify what they contain.

You can use up to 256 characters in a file name. I’ve actually seen other people adopt this practice in their business environment.

Here’s a for instance, “Off site meeting 8-21-07 at Phoenix Hilton discussed options for project XYZ decided to go after a new contract with ABC company instead of EFG company 155 Joe Smith Sam Brown Sarah Pallino George Roth attended”

On the surface it doesn’t sound like a bad idea. It’s like an abstract of the document. However, if you look at the title in Windows Explorer, you only get to see the first 50 characters or so and it’s not too easy to read the whole title. Even if you could read the whole title easily it slows down the process of finding sought after information. There also still is some software operations out there that will truncate long file names down to 7 characters with a tilde on the end, thereby destroying your name.

I support the idea of a date in the file name. Use the yyyymmdd convention. It may get confusing if you continue to alter the file, but if you are diligent you can version changes and save as v2. File naming is a lot like assigning metadata to a file. Think about what are the top three items that will help you find the file in the future, other than the date. In my long name file above, it would be the project, people involved, date and key reference: So a decent file name could be
ProjectXYZ-EFGCompany-SBrownSPallinoGRoth-20070821V2.

What’s new?

Vertonghen acquired PearlDoc, a global provider of document capture and management solutions.
Vertonghen is a global provider of Enterprise Document Management (EDM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions and services that streamline the process of capturing mission-critical content for access from within business applications and processes.
Its customers are high-volume banking and financials (both investment and retail), insurance companies, copyright and other high-volume administration companies but also more locally operating legal-, accounting- or secretary-offices.

About a year or so ago, I installed a 20 inch monitor that serves as a dual screen to my laptop. That’s been wonderful for productivity. I do most of my work on the big screen and look at the laptop screen for reference materials. This practice is becoming quite common for many people.

I did notice that my newspaper has the same reading area as the big monitor, 21×11 inches. Never considered that before! An open newspaper has an area of 42×22 inches, equivalent to two 20 inch monitors. I have been a student for many years about how people search for and find useful information to gain knowledge. The first step of this process normally is to scan a reading area quickly then select segments to explore in more depth. I compared the efficiency of picking up useful information from the newspaper compared to my monitors and realized that it was no contest. I found more things in the newspaper that lead me to read further than I did on the monitors. Why is that?

Of course, we are not comparing apples to apples. Newspapers have fixed content whereas I can “paper” my monitors with content of my choice. However, I can scan through more than 100 pages of information in the newspapers very quickly and make learning connections between dispirit articles. I thought back to the days when I was a research scientist, thumbing through many paper journals. Many new ideas were hatched because I noted something in an article that I never would have read from the title alone. Serendipity is a good thing. Keyword searching and scanning titles enables one to examine a lot more information than can be done by scanning paper journals and newspapers. If you are looking for something specific, this is the way to go, but browsing will often lead to more new concepts.

The world of accessible information is still growing exponentially. What’s the best way to keep current? Try to browse through at least one newspaper daily. I guarantee that you will find something useful and interesting there. They still employ very high quality writers and editors. Get internet references for your information needs sent to you via Google Alerts. You should continually tweak these profiles to match what you want. I realign mine monthly. Several electronic newspapers will also send you alerts based on your profile. This will get you the BIG news, but won’t usually pick up local happenings. I also highly recommend belonging to some kind of professional society. I pick up at least one good idea to follow up with at every meeting.

The new Adobe Acrobat X family encompasses Acrobat X , Reader X and online document exchange services. A new bundle, Acrobat X Suite, includes Photoshop CS5, Captivate 5, Presenter 7, Livecycle Designer ES2 and Media Encoder CS5. Only Acrobat X Pro and the online services will be available for Macintosh users.
Nuxeo announced that it has partnered with IMMO-SYSTEMS to offer both cloud and on-premise document management applications, IMMO-SYSTEMS joined the Nuxeo Galaxy program to bring a flexible, easy-to-integrate Java-based solution with workable pricing to its small to medium-sized enterprise. Its flagship product Espaceis a document management solution offered as a hosted service (SaaS). The company is targeting businesses with less than 200 employees with the hosted solution. For larger organizations, IMMO-SYSTEMS offers the option of a dedicated server hosted in its datacenter or a server residing at the customer’s premise.

ELN / LIMS

Kinematik Inc. announced the launch of an Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN) built on Microsoft SharePoint 2010. Kinematik’s ELN extends SharePoint’s functionality to include experiments, lab notes, publishing of experiments to Microsoft Word and PDF, automated processes and integration with lab equipment.

In many instances, the company will give you some instruction about what kind of information you should transfer or share. Most of the time, there is little if any checking on the accuracy of what you do or don’t transfer. These days, most of the information will be electronic, but there will be some paper, particularly if you have been around for awhile. How diligent would you be? After all, THEY just got rid of you. You don’t want to burn any bridges, but organizing and transferring records will not help to get you future raises and promotions. You do a “good enough” job with the transfers and then focus on your future.

Suppose you are a records/information manager who has the job of collecting and organizing records from more than 100 departing employees. Knowing what the environment is like, what’s the best way to attain your goal? Most employees will behave like I or you as I described above. However there will be some who will be very angry or naturally unorganized who will leave their records in a jumble. This normally is about 5% of the population.

You will probably get plugged in after the bomb is dropped. Make sure that you are aligned with your IT people. Keep instructions simple. I highly recommend the 3 piles approach for paper files, email, and other electronic files.

Pile #1 is the “good” pile. It contains items that are valuable to your successor.
Pile #2 is the “maybe” file. It might be good stuff but maybe not.
Pile #3 is the trash. Not useful to your successor without additional input.

Provide people with 3 bar coded boxes to sort their paper into. Send them an email with the bar code names and ask them to send back a summary of what they placed in them. Export the email strings as an msg file and store in an appropriate folder.

Your IT people should be able to move the 3 piles from email and personal shares into a common location.

Sorting out who gets what is never straight forward. Each department should have a nominated person who can direct the piles to the right place, but most people are loath to take on a new set of records which may have questionable value to them.

In the end, there will be a lot of records that will go unclaimed. The best approach is to store all of them for a period of 2-5 years. There will be a flurry of interest in some of them for about a year, then they will lay dormant and probably can be disposed of.

Of course if there is a legal litigation hold, some may have to be retained for a longer period of time.

Information Management/Archiving

IBM announced the release of new content services for Lotus Quickr called DOCOVA Integrated that enables Quickr users to expand the document collaboration element of the platform into a complete document and content management solution.
This integration is especially important for Lotus Domino Document Manager users looking for a Lotus Domino-based migration option as DOCOVA Integrated Content Services gives Quickr users full control over the entire lifecycle of their content and documents through its customizable application framework functionalities.

Infotrieve, Inc. announced the release of the Mobile Library™ iPad app. With the Mobile Library™, users have secure access from anywhere to all corporate licensed electronic content and document repositories, as well as access to the world’s largest collection of STM content. The Mobile Library™ is fully integrated with Infotrieve’s Content SCM® content and rights management platform, and users can seamlessly switch from the iPad to their PC or Mac without skipping a beat, as the user’s workspace is automatically synchronized across platforms. Utilizing Content SCM®’s full suite of rights management capabilities, the system ensures that corporate electronic content usage is fully compliant with all content licenses across the enterprise.

Enterprise content management (ECM) vendor Hyland Software has purchased privately held Computer Systems Company (CSC), a developer of business and clinical healthcare software and document conversion services.
Open Text this announced a huge enterprise content management (in the fullest extent of the term) release. Open Text says the new suite incorporates more than 90 products and services as it attempts to be the soup to nuts enterprise content management solution.

Snowbound Software, announced the release of its AJAX browser-based image and document viewer for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 content management system.

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

A lot of the early projects I implemented concerned the conversion of paper based business operations to computer based. Through these experiences I learned that the biggest obstacle to implementing new processes was peoples’ inherent fear of change. This is a basic characteristic of people that has been developed through evolution. Men are driven by nature to find the highest place for them within a hierarchy and are motivated to protect their position and move up when possible. Women have different motivations which are concerned with social influence. But they too will fight to maintain their position and status.

Fear is an emotional response to a perceived threat. It is a basic survival mechanism occurring in response to a specific stimulus, such as pain or the threat of danger.
I have seen all of the following common reactions to fear in some people when I was trying to introduce change:

• Anger
• Increased blood pressure
• Tightening of muscles
• Dilation of the pupils (to let in more light)
• Increased sweating

If you see that a lot of people are reacting with fear to the changes you are proposing, things have gone very wrong and most likely the program that you are trying to implement is in serious danger of failing. Fear is contagious and will spread rapidly.

Here are a few hints on how to minimize the fear reaction.

A person trying to introduce change must first of all be likeable and unthreatening. This is much more important initially than extensive explanations about why the change will be a good thing for all. You can be likeable when you sincerely try to learn about people whose job scope will be affected. Be a friend; don’t push your agenda too hard at the beginning.

For many people change will mean making some information that they currently control more public. They will cease to be the exclusive “go to” person. This is the “I know something important that no one else knows” power position. Their new role will be to manage the life cycle of the information collection assuring that it is complete and up to date. If they are the information authors the new process should advertise that they are the “inventors” and will fortify their position.
Explain this to them. It may take a little while to sink in, but most of them will get it.

There will always be a few people whose fear level will be too high to overcome initially. However, after they see that others are not afraid they will come around.

Iron Mountain Incorporated has expanded its partnership with InterVision to allow the Santa Clara, Calif. IT firm to offer users of NetApp and Microsoft Exchange Iron Mountain’s newly-acquired NearPoint(TM) solution for archiving, accessing and protecting email. InterVision’s customers can now enjoy high performance, manageability and lower operating costs by combining leading technology from NetApp and Iron Mountain in a single integrated solution for managing Microsoft Exchange.

ELN / LIMS
In order to minimize disruption to their existing processes and procedures, Novozymes chose to develop their own, custom-built ELN solution. By taking their lab processes digital, Novozymes saves the time it takes for teams of scientists to assemble and authorize paper-based documentation. Through the ELN, documents proving scientific discovery and product inventions (which are later used in patent applications) are approved and trusted via standard digital signatures, and made electronically available to an unlimited number of researchers from remote locations, for years into the future. The potential benefits of enhanced collaboration and document control influenced Novozymes’ decision to base their ELN solution on a SharePoint foundation, a document management platform which they were already using for various other business processes. The addition of digital signatures to the ELN makes the entire solution electronic through-out.

We generate more and more data in the pursuit of further scientific knowledge, and paradoxically, the more we know, the less certain we become, and so we need more data to seek the truth; the perpetual data machine. Data volumes grow to overwhelming levels; we need to store it somewhere for future reference, and for re-interpretation. We may also need it for regulatory or legal purposes which means we may need to keep it a long time. We may need to transfer it to other programmes for processing. We may need to reduce it to graphical images in order to understand it. We may need to derive a set of conclusions for inclusion in reports or presentations. We may need to import data from external agencies, such as CROs. And we know that data volumes will still continue to grow.

And yet, we don’t have any accepted intentional standards for the interchange of laboratory data; we don’t have any agreed integration standards or strategies for data communication; we cannot be confident that today’s applications, operating systems and media will survive for as long as we need the data to survive. All in all, it is not a healthy situation or one that inspires confidence, so what hope is there that it could ever get better? There are perhaps three alternative means by which the situation could change. Firstly, by force; if a regulatory or legal agency were to demand that all data comply with international standards, then the industry would need to respond, but this seems highly unlikely, certainly in the short term. Secondly, by community action; there have been several worthy attempts to evolve international standards either through the adoption of commercially based de facto standards, or by ‘standards’ associations formulating standards. In some instances, this has worked out well. For example, the adoption of PDF and PDF/A as ISO standards has shown that a global demand for document standards can be achieved by adopting a de facto standard. However, most initiatives with laboratory data have failed to acquire adequate uptake, and therefore have struggled to have any substantial impact. The third option is to sit back and wait for technology to provide us with a solution. To some extent this is already happening with the increasing use of XML for data interchange, but without suitable ontologies, there are still limitations.

Two specific community initiatives are currently addressing the laboratory data problem. The Pistoia Alliance, an initiative to provide an open foundation of data standards, ontologies and web-services to streamline the Pharmaceutical Drug Discovery workflow (Chemistry, Biological Screening, Logistics) through common business terms, relationships and processes. The work is currently being undertaken by member companies to develop open standards to support the interchange of data between CROs and their major customers in the Pharmaceutical industry. With a growing number of members, including vendors, the initiative faces a number of challenges, but probably represents the broadest approach to date to tackle the problem.

The other initiative is AnIML, the goal of which is to serve as the open-source development platform for a new XML standard for Analytical Chemistry Information. The project is a collaborative effort between many groups and individuals and is sanctioned by the ASTM under subcommittee E13.15. AnIML is receiving attention from vendors, a critical step towards adoption, but lacks the focused business case that is driving the Pistoia Alliance. Of course, if the Pistoia Aliiance were to adopt AnIML for analytical data interchange……….

The other consideration is how much of the Pistoia Alliance’s objectives have been addressed within the clinical world where a number of data interchange standards already exist. There are sufficient parallels with clinical chemistry at the laboratory level to believe that there may be no need to reinvent the wheel, but to adapt existing open standards to the requirements of non-clinical laboratories. The progress of Pistoia and AnIML will be observed closely

A common definition of a signature is: a mark or sign made by an individual on a document to signify knowledge, approval, acceptance, or obligation. I recall when I was in my 30’s creating a distinctive, artsy signature like you see on the U. S. Declaration of Independence. I employed this bold signature for many years with gusto. It was huge and overflowed all boundaries. Over the years the number of times that I had to write my signature decreased substantially. E-mail, banking on line and document work flow software contributed to this. I also became aware that very few people even looked at my signature except for over eager seasonal retail clerks. In fact, one recently questioned why my 6×2 inch signature on a receipt looked different from the 3×0.5 inch one on the back of my credit card. Duh!

I’ve noticed that more and more retail stores have installed hardware and software that has eliminated signatures on paper. After you swipe your credit card, you make your mark on a touch screen with a special “pen”. The legibility of my signature has virtually disappeared, but it doesn’t matter. Making the mark signifies acceptance of the transaction and is legally binding.

The E-Sign Act validates electronic contracts in interstate and foreign commerce. The act does not apply to certain types of documents, including wills, Divorce notices, and documents that are associated with court proceedings.

A digital signature is based on cryptography, which uses mathematical formulas, or algorithms, to scramble messages. Using encryption and decryption software, the sender can scramble the message and the recipient can unscramble it. To affix a digital signature to an electronic document, a signer must obtain electronic “keys.” The keys are assigned in pairs: a private key and a public key.

A person creates his keys using a software program. The digital signature is affixed to the electronic document using the private key. The “signer” types in a password, similar to a personal identification number for an automatic teller machine. The private key then generates a long string of numbers and letters that represent the digital signature, or public key. The recipient of the message runs a software program using this public key to authenticate that the document was signed by the private key and that the document has not been altered during transmission.

It is mathematically infeasible for a person to derive another person’s private key. The only way to compromise a digital signature is to give another person access to the signature software and the password to the private key.

Will name signatures eventually go away? Probably not for awhile. But the act of composing the name certainly will. We seem to be moving towards electronic signet rings and away from hand signed signatures.

Autonomy Corporation plc announced the availability of Autonomy Social Media Governance, the industry’s first solution designed to monitor, govern, and protect organizations across social media channels. Autonomy Social Media Governance extends Autonomy’s market-leading supervision, policy, and compliance platform – used today by the world’s leadto enable businesses to maintain compliance with new regulatory requirements for employees engaging on social media sites.

Iron Mountain Incorporated announced its Mimosa NearPoint™solution is the first email archiving solution to be certified for the Dell™ DX Object Storage Platform. The newly launched Dell DX Object Storage Platform is an integrated hardware and software solution designed to efficiently access, store and distribute billions of files and other digital content. With the NearPoint solution, the unified content management offering will help organizations reduce the costs and risks of managing unstructured data from Microsoft® Exchange®.

ELN / LIMS

Rescentris, Inc. announced iPad and iPhone platform clients to extend mobile use of its award-winning CERF Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN). CERF is a scalable, cross-platform software solution that helps life sciences and other R&D organizations migrate away from paper-based recordkeeping to increase efficiency and collaboration.

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

I had preached before about the importance of having good external backups and disaster recovery systems. My good works paid off when my 4 year old external terabyte drive died a few weeks ago. I was also periodically burning DVDs, annually to preserve archive information in addition to keeping it on the terabyte drive. I only lost a month of two of semi-important information in the end.

I found that the price and size of terabyte external drives had dropped enormously over the past few years so decided to buy 2 terabyte USB drives, keep them on-line all of time and structure my information warehouse, disaster recovery plan and PC hard drive management accordingly.

The first place to start is deciding what kinds of information do you really need to cart around on your PC no matter where you are. This logic should be the same whether you have a home office like me or work in a corporate environment.

Let’s first consider your email files. For many of us, this means Outlook. Unless you constantly refer to old email information move your archive pst files off of your PC. It is very easy to access in a repository if/when you need it. We’ll talk more about other ways to manager your emails next month. There is a lot to learn!

So do you really need to carry around ALL of your information? Organize by year. That way you can decide whether to carry around only new stuff and maybe some old stuff. If you don’t have it sorted by year you will not have a choice. No big trick here. If you organize by year, then you will have to capability in the future to destroy old information too. If you keep it in a big jumble, the percentage of worthless information will continue to accumulate. And some day, you will run out of room, just like your attic or basement.

Getting back to disaster recovery, now that I have 2 external terabyte drives, I run my backups, using Microsoft utilities once a week writing to alternate drives. All of my libraries and a system image are saved. If one of the external drives goes kaput, I have the other.
Yes I know that if my house blows up, all may be lost. I’ll play the odds for now. There are other redundancies I could work in like keeping a copy of my stuff in “the Cloud” but I really don’t want to go there.

My success story is that I now have control over how much I store on my PC. The only factor that will change this is the installation new software. When this occurs, I try to uninstall something that I rarely if ever use.

Recent AIIM research (http://www.aiim.org/marketiq) found that 90% of organizations are using the PDF file format for long-term storage of scanned documents, and 89% are converting Office files to PDF for distribution and archive. Not surprisingly, paper is currently used by 100% of organizations, but when asked to predict the situation in 5 years time, use of paper for long-term storage dropped to 77%, whereas PDF rose to 93%.

ELN / LIMS
The NeuroScholar Project is the flagship project for the Biomedical Knowledge Engineering Research Group at the Information Sciences Institute in Marina Del Rey.
The NeuroScholar system is the flagship application of this project but they have developed other tools to be used in conjunction with the system. These deliver specialized functionality to a neuroscience knowledge user such as the ‘Electronic Laboratory Notebook’ (ELN), support for schematic diagrams (Diagrammar) and neuroanatomical mapping functions (NeuARt II). The NAWS system is a method for using NeuroScholar to be able to run analyses on it’s contents as a remote webservice, and the Sangam project is concerned with intergrating information between different web services (of which NeuroScholar could be one). They have also built software engineering tools to assist with the construction of NeuroScholar-like knowledge bases. This subsystem is called the ‘View-Primitive Data Model framework’ (VPDMf’).

Within the context of laboratory data and information management, raw data tends to draw out some interesting debate along the lines of what constitutes raw data, how and where do we store it, and for how long?

Those of us involved in the business of laboratory systems and laboratory integration can be kept pretty busy with the technological challenges of acquiring, managing and storing ever increasing volumes of raw data, but behind these challenges are some more fundamental questions that need to be answered before we can even start thinking about a solution.

So, if we assume that we know what the raw data is, the decision about how long we keep it is influenced by three different considerations.

Firstly, scientists are often hoarders of data and like to hang on to raw data as basic scientific evidence, for reference purposes,  or for re-assessment in the light of future scientific or technological advances. This requirement has no definable timeframe.

Secondly, there is an ethical position, largely determined by regulatory bodies, to allow for the re-examination of data in the light of the consequences of unforeseen defects, failures or adverse effects of products or processes.  This timeframe may be determined by, or related to the lifetime of the product or process.

Thirdly, there is a business requirement to address IP protection in terms of the underlying value of the data to the business.  This may have a long timeframe if it is relevant to a patent, but could in other circumstances have a relatively short timeframe.

Making the decision on what to store and for how long has its complexities, but the combination of regulatory and legal guidance, business best practice, good technology and hopefully, common sense, is helping shape a way forward.  However, it is always good to remember that the scientific knowledge food-chain starts with the raw data, and an item by Derek Lowe (Data, Raw and Otherwise), loosely connected to ‘Climategate’ on In the Pipeline serves as a good reminder of the importance of raw data from the scientist’s perspective.