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Study of electronic lab notebook design and practices that emerged in a collaborative scientific environment

Published: 15 February 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Prolific adoption of digital media across scientific fields has led to inevitable transformation of a traditional lab book into an electronic lab notebook (ELN). Research so far has focussed on designing ELN prototypes and learning from their limited deployments. At the same time, a variety of commercially available ELNs have been adopted by industrial and academic laboratories. That provides opportunities for situated research and a deeper understanding of the role that ELNs assumes as an integral part of a scientific environment. In this paper we present a study of ELN design that has emerged as scientists appropriated commercial off-the-shelf note-taking software and adapted it to their work. Through in-situ observations we analysed the interplay between the technology and emerging practices. Our study reveals a tension that is intrinsic to the digital nature of ELNs: a conflict between the flexibility, fluidity, and low threshold for modifying digital records and the requirement for persistence and consistency. This led to refined requirements and design considerations for ELNs.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CSCW '14: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing
    February 2014
    1600 pages
    ISBN:9781450325400
    DOI:10.1145/2531602
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 15 February 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. content organization
    2. electronic lab notebook
    3. linking
    4. pivots
    5. practice
    6. tagging

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    February 15 - 19, 2014
    Maryland, Baltimore, USA

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    CSCW '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 134 of 497 submissions, 27%;
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    • (2023)I (Don’t) Know What You Did Last Summer: A Framework for Ubiquitous Research PreservationExtended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544549.3585754(1-6)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • (2022)Making the collective knowledge of chemistry open and machine actionableNature Chemistry10.1038/s41557-022-00910-714:4(365-376)Online publication date: 4-Apr-2022
    • (2022)A Comprehensive IT Infrastructure for an Enzymatic Product Development in a Digitalized Biotechnological LaboratorySmart Biolabs of the Future10.1007/10_2022_207(61-82)Online publication date: 22-Jul-2022
    • (2020)Between Scripts and Applications: Computational Media for the Frontier of NanoscienceProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376287(1-13)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
    • (2020)Analysis of the Perception of University Students About the Use of Microsoft OneNote as an Electronic Laboratory Notebook in Response to Non-Face-to-Face Education in Pandemic TimesInformation and Communication Technologies10.1007/978-3-030-62833-8_13(150-162)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2020
    • (2019)Too many tags spoil the metadata: investigating the knowledge management of scientific research with semantic web technologiesJournal of Cheminformatics10.1186/s13321-019-0345-811:1Online publication date: 21-Mar-2019
    • (2019)Electronic Lab Notebooks and Experimental Design AssistantsGood Research Practice in Non-Clinical Pharmacology and Biomedicine10.1007/164_2019_287(257-275)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2019
    • (2018)The Story in the NotebookProceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3173574.3173748(1-11)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2018
    • (2018)MeetingVis: Visual Narratives to Assist in Recalling Meeting Context and ContentIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2018.281620324:6(1918-1929)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2018
    • (2018)Implementation and Student Perceptions on Google Docs as an Electronic Laboratory Notebook in Organic ChemistryJournal of Chemical Education10.1021/acs.jchemed.7b0051895:7(1102-1111)Online publication date: 30-May-2018
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