Students and faculty members of Ohio State University recently had a chance to learn what Electronic Lab Notebooks are and how they are used in lab research settings. Specialists Rob Day and Wolfgang Rumpf visited the University’s Digital Union on January 29th and talked about why ELNs are needed in modern research. During their visit, Day and Rumpf also answered questions, met with faculty members, and hosted a focus group to review upcoming ideas.
A good-quality ELN can:
- Store ANY amount of digital information in ANY format from ANY source.
- Facilitate secure, regulated collaboration and interaction between workers in the same lab or on opposite sides of the world.
- Serve as a centralized, one-stop location for all documents, literature, protocols, grants, and in-progress or completed publications, dissertation chapters and raw data.
- Create templates for frequently repeated experiments and procedures making training and oversight of assistants easy and efficient.
- Protect data acquired from human-subjects studies, medical research or other areas where confidentiality and security are required.
- Prevent data from “walking away” from your lab.
- Keep all of your data in a form that will let you present it as unquestionably authentic in any legal, regulatory or academic misconduct proceedings
– From OSU’s Digital Union article recap of the Rescentris visit, “What is an ELN?”
Ohio State’s Digital Union is a partnership between the Office of the Chief Information Officer and the University libraries. The Digital Union’s mission is to expand OSU’s research, teaching, and learning capacities through technology. Readers can watch the video of the entire presentation, courtesy of OSU’s Workshop recording.
