Q&A Forum

     Re: Electronic Lab books - yes or no?

Did you ever move forward with a decision Labtrack or CERF? I've actually become more interested in this topic. I am now running a CORE facility. I will also be evaluating different ELNs so that I can track our services.
Currently we are using a 4D database that I find to be limiting.

     Re: Electronic Lab books - yes or no?

Thanks Shelby, we were looking at LabTrack for now, but we will have a look at CERF too. It seems that the products are fairly similar.
Management of data in the Lab is a big issue and I want to streamline that process ASAP.

     Re: Electronic Lab books - yes or no?

Yes--I attended a presentation by CERF recently. Very impressive. They make some really good points about how paper based lab notebooks fail when there is a question of IP rights. Those with the dates get the rights. Automatic electronic dating removes any questions about who did what first.

Another point they mentioned was the inefficiency of data management in a research lab. Questions of "have we done this experiment yet?" are easily addressed with an eNB. Since you keep a historical record of everything, there is no need to re-run a gel that you drew on when it comes time to publish :)

     Re: Electronic Lab books - yes or no?

I say yes and it is going to be the future. Students that are coming out of colleges and Universities now a days can type faster than they can write. Accessibility is a huge bonus and ease of use for cutting and pasting work into publications or reports.
I think the main question would be. Is your notebook intranet or internet accessible?
I stopped using a lab notebook years ago when I came across a program called Evernote. In this program I can index and date all of my work. I can also cut and paste images, data, and tables from other programs. The nice part about Evernote is that they also have a internet accessible server where you can save everything. I also use this program to index all of my business interests, internet bookmarks, past resumes, and various letters. It has numerous uses.

     Re: Electronic Lab books - yes or no?

It looks interesting novel idea however, may be there will be some stero effects on publication, privacy, and patent issues. As it is new idea so need to discuss with legal experts prior to its implementation.