eScience

Evaluating electronic laboratory notebooks in chemistry research

Abstract

The School of Chemistry at UNSW is undertaking a trial of an electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) with selected honours and postgraduate research students. This ELN was developed at the University of Southampton and has been designed to accommodate the diversity of research in science. The concept of an ELN is that all the data from instruments, the observations of a researcher, their notes, thoughts, etc, will be captured within the ELN. The UNSW/Southampton ELN is a blog of each researcher’s experiments, which resides on a secure server and is accessed through the web. It is intended that data will be readily retrievable for creating presentations, writing papers and ultimately the student’s thesis. The project has obtained a number of input devices (e.g. netbook, tablet and notebook PCs, PDA) and will trial their use with the web site. The central part of this trial is the perceptions of staff and students as to the merits of adopting an ELN and the usefulness of an ELN to access experimental data more efficiently and to enhance communication between students and their supervisor(s).