electronic lab notebooks – Jonathan Eisen's Lab

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:

iddux @phylogenomics basecamp
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
Miss__Tina @phylogenomics We also have 2 separate US docs from rest of world docs when they use the cmputr kiosks. Not allowed 2 read the same stuff.

FriendFeed had a wealth of useful information:

Tag: electronic lab notebooks