Laboratory notebooks in the digital era: the role of ELNs in record keeping for chemistry and other sciences

Abstract

Egyptian evidence of scientific records dates back almost 50 centuries. In more recent times da Vinci and Faraday provide role models for scrupulous recording of ideas, observations, and conclusions. Their medium was paper, but despite the quality of their notebooks, we cannot turn the clock back. Our primary purpose is to review the influences of the digital era on scientific record keeping. We examine the foundations of the emerging opportunities for preserving and curating electronic records focussing on electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs), with an emphasis on their characteristics and usability.

Online electronic laboratory notebook: A secured cloud storage system scripted in Hypertext Pre-processor (PHP) programming language

“…These methods of record tracking are being slowly replaced by the arrival of digital technologies, where the data can be easily searched, shared, easily backed up, and is readily accessed (Boulton et al, 2012). Electronic laboratory notebook can benefit researchers by facilitating long-term storage, reproducibility, and enhanced availability of experiment records (Bird, 2013;Hice, 2017). Recently, semantic laboratory notebooks (SLNs) have been utilized to explore these functions as a formalized metadata (Coles, 2013).…”

“…Any developed software can be licensed as: paid for which is a proprietary piece of software that can be purchased, paid (with free version) is a proprietary piece of software that can be purchased, but which also has a version of this software which can be used for some time as free, open source which is a product where the code behind the actual software has been made openly available so that anyone can redistribute it, and finally a free product which is free to use. Cost is a significant barrier to electronic laboratory notebook adoption, further stay hours, troubleshooting, and maintenance with support add up to the cost (Bird, 2013;Goddard, 2009;Rudolphi, 2011). Free softwares would clearly have the advantage of being cheaper to run and test but may have disadvantage in terms of features.…”

“…Another challenge to the electronic laboratory notebooks is ease of use when compared with the paper notebooks. Paper notebooks are easier to use, input data, read, transport, and inexpensive, with no training and minimal IT support (Bird, 2013;Brandl, 2010;Cooke, 2017). Web based tools weigh more as compared to platform dependent softwares, as web based are platform independent, while non-web based rely on certain operating systems with platform compatibility.…”

Strategy for Extensible, Evolving Terminology for the Materials Genome Initiative Efforts

“…17 In addition to providing optimized workflow and time-saving benefits, ELNs, with semantically annotated data, could interact with distributed resources to help perform scientific procedures. 18 Technological innovations, like RDF and ELNs, are changing how science is connected and practiced. These changes increase the need for a logical, easy method for the materials community to grow a common materials data terminology.…”

The Evolution of Digital Chemistry at Southampton

“…Particularly relevant for this papera re the research themes on chemical information and the Semantic Web [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] and the work on Electronic Laboratory Notebooks. [14,15] The e-Science programme was not the only driver for the Southampton Chemical Information group. The EPSRCfunded CombinatorialC hemistryp rojectl ed by Mark Bradley (which funded an ew building at Southampton in 1998), offered huge potential in generating chemical structure and property data.…”