ConnectedBases

An interesting discussion has arisen on Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELNs) and why “wet lab” biologists don’t use them.

Neil points out several advantages of ELNs, which I will paraphrase:

• Easily share data with lab members/collaborators
• Search experiments by date, title, keywords, tags
• Link experiments to related resources: “protocols, MSDS data, risk assessments, plasmid maps, PubMed entries, tagged data in social networks”

In a comment, Curtis says:

“While nearly every aspect of the modern research enterprise changes quickly, the lab notebook hasn’t changed in over 100 years”,

which he means as an indictment of the paper based notebook. I would take the opposite tack; If it has worked for 100 years or more, maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to throw paper based notebooks out.
The problem with ELNs is that they are inconvenient, compared to paper notebooks. ELNs require access to a computer to read or write. Also, it is easier to lose digital information, than paper and pen based information (I’ve had far more hard disk crashes than I care to think about).
Most laboratory computers aren’t at the bench, they are at the desk. Since they aren’t located where the work is occurring, there are three main options for writing up experiments.

1. Write up experiments completely before the experiment occurs, then perform the experiment just as planned.
2. Try to remember everything and type it up afterwards.
3. Write things in pen and paper, then transpose into the ELN.

The problem with each of these, respectively, is:

1. Things rarely go exactly as planned.
2. The longer between observing something and writing it down increases the possibility of errors.
3. Transposing information is twice the work, and also increases the possibility of errors.

In the real world, a mixture of all of these would be the way to go, but I think it is unlikely to be readily adopted by academic scientists, because of the hassle. Instead, I think we should try to leverage the work people put into their venerable old paper and pen lab notebooks with digital technologies.
One easy path to searchable, shareable notebooks might be Optical Character Recognition, where one scans in the lab notebook pages and lets the computer figure out what’s what, but this approach will be limited by how often a researcher drags the notebook over to the scanner.

An interesting alternative would be the recently announced pen-top computer from Livescribe. Basically, this is a pen that can “remember” what you write, and upload what you have written to a computer. I envision writing in my notebook, then when I (and the pen) get back to the computer, the recorded text is uploaded to the computer and “auto-blogged” into my ELN. Sure, it’s not perfect: any images I paste into my paper notebook wouldn’t be saved, and the formatting won’t be perfect. However, I could have a date and keyword searchable archive of the things I have written, from which I can then reference to my actual notebook.

If ELNs are going to come into common use, there are only two ways: forced by the industry/academic hierarchy, or so easy and simple to adopt that researchers would be fools not to start using it.

Learn from the iPod: it needs to be easy.