Well, I opened up a great can of worms today with a Twitter/Friendfeed post:
“Am looking for systems for my lab to make electronic lab notebooks – suggestions? wiki? OWW? software?”
And have gotten some great responses so far from my various social networking circles and I thought I would centralize them here. At the bottom I will post some of the raw responses. Here is a current summary
Suggested things to look at so far
- Basecamp
- Evernote
- Word documents in notebook layout
- Circus ponies notebook
- Google docs and Dropbox
- WordPress blogs, versioned, subscribe to RSS feeds of your student’s work, HUGE GPL community.
- Ontowiki
- Open Wet Ware
- SmartPens such as ones from LiveScribe
- Google wave
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From Twitter:
- srhymes @phylogenomics have you tried Evernote? I use that for a lab notebook and love it! And it syncs across home, work, iphone, iPad…
- MeadGal @phylogenomics I like a word document in notebook layout. I tried labassistant from mekentosj and i see it working for some, just not me.
- iGenomics @phylogenomics Depends on what you want. We’ve developed a software -BioRhythm to track Bioinformaics project progress like twitter a msg.
- kbradnam @phylogenomics How important is sharing, cross-platform accessibility, and offline access?
- phylogenomics @kbradnam #1 = ease of use, #2 = sharing, #3 = cross platform
- kbradnam @phylogenomics Evernote would work well in some ways (cross platform, desktop + phone clients etc), but it stores data in its own format…
- kbradnam @phylogenomics But the exporting options for Evernote are a bit weak. See http://bit.ly/zRx1
- jobadge @phylogenomics @kbradnam @richardbadge uses a wiki on our VLE Blackboard as lab book http://ff.im/lDrSf
- rachelss @phylogenomics Try Circus Ponies’ Notebook
- kbradnam @phylogenomics Here is a list of many online notebook tools (http://bit.ly/8jK9), though I think a wiki or Evernote would also work well.
- kbradnam @phylogenomics We use Google Docs & Dropbox a lot in our lab. I’m hoping that HTML5 will eventually bring syncing of docs to a local DB.
- jrmiller2 @phylogenomics google wave seems ideal
- Miss__Tina @phylogenomics I’m on a internal review committee for this kind of stuff for one of my pharma clients. It’s a nightmare.
- phylogenomics @Miss__Tina Couldn’t agree more; been looking at this for years & nothing jumps out at me yet
FriendFeed had a wealth of useful information:
http://friendfeed.com/treeoflife/f9791f25/am-looking-for-systems-my-lab-to-make-electronic?embed=1
Also got some useful feedback from Eric Alm on Facebook who said they use Smart pens from LiveScribe.com
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Jonathan Eisen's Lab 
Speaking out of turn — I'm not really clear on what's needed — but I've never met a problem that a threaded forum couldn't fix, http://www.nabble.com/ Threaded, embeddable forums plus a bunch of other stuff, for free.
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In my group we are using OpenAtrium and we are quite happy with it. It is not perfect, but it is free and has everything we need.
Maybe you may find other answers by looking at this question on biostars, even if it is only related to how to manage scripts:
– http://biostar.stackexchange.com/questions/58/what-is-the-best-way-to-share-scripts-between-members-of-a-lab
You can also open a new thread if you wish 🙂
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Electronic Laboratory notebooks (ELNs) are becoming increasingly popular and important because of government regulations such as 21CFR11, which specify how records must be created, digitally authenticated and archived. Digital lab records that are 21CFR11 compliant are admissible in legal or regulatory proceedings. There are some great free ELN's out there but ultimately, in terms of support, compliance and sophistication, you get what you pay for. One example of a modern multidisciplinary ELN is CERF by Rescentris Inc. CERF is the only ELN that is both Mac and Windows compatible and fully 21CFR11 compliant. It includes advanced features such as semantic metadata searches and publishing to off-site archives that help principle investigators manage and secure valuable data. It's built on open standards too, so it plays well with others, works in any IT environment and assures future access to your data. For academic labs, it's also cheaper than you might think.
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Electronic Laboratory notebooks (ELNs) are becoming increasingly popular and important because of government regulations such as 21CFR11, which specify how records must be created, digitally authenticated and archived. Digital lab records that are 21CFR11 compliant are admissible in legal or regulatory proceedings. There are some great free ELN's out there but ultimately, in terms of support, compliance and sophistication, you get what you pay for. One example of a modern multidisciplinary ELN is CERF by Rescentris Inc. CERF is the only ELN that is both Mac and Windows compatible and fully 21CFR11 compliant. It includes advanced features such as semantic metadata searches and publishing to off-site archives that help principle investigators manage and secure valuable data. It's built on open standards too, so it plays well with others, works in any IT environment and assures future access to your data. For academic labs, it's also cheaper than you might think.
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Check out other ELNs so they will give you a better idea what options u should give em to users. I heard that eNovator is a good electronic lab notebook & you can check others too.
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Check out other ELNs so they will give you a better idea what options u should give em to users. I heard that eNovator is a good electronic lab notebook & you can check others too.
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Try http://www.sparklix.com .
It's a free online Electronic Lab Notebook for life science.
Very intuitive and professional. And it will always be free for the public. There are also commercial Pro-version with extra business-features (like project hierarchy and time lines). However the free version is superb !
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Check out LabArchives…www.labarchives.com, one of the newest and most innovative of the web-based entries
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Electronic lab notebooks are a fairly new technology and offer many benefits to the user as well as organizations. These are easier to search upon, support collaboration amongst many users, and can be made more secure than their paper counterparts. Thanks a lot.
Electronic Notebook
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