E-lab notebooks

>> back to the grid

Notes by Lynn Yarmey: e-Lab Notebooks and OMERO - image curation (http://openmicroscopy.org/site)

Discussed relationship with DMPs

Issues:

• people keep notebooks for many different purposes, have separate styles
• extracting something from a notebook is dicey to start - so be clear on goal. For example: patent suit, 7Mil to go through paper notebooks consideration - can you prove provenance from burned CD copy?

Selection criteria:

• affordability
• ease of use
• ease of access
• length of trial
• non-pharmaceutical-based
• needs to work for users
• curation components - export files, metadata standardization

Examples:

• CERF (by Rescentris)
• Cambridge Soft (owns ChemDraw) - downside, cost plus lots of backend infrastrcuture; somewhat of a layer over Word and Excel. Cambridgesoft was recently bought by Perkin Elmer
• Wiki + Google docs; digital lives study found big problems with legalities in cloud agreements, no promises about longevity, security, etc.
• University of Southampton projects with chemistry lab notebooks

Open Science vs. Other research approaches

Costs - how to compete with Amazon in terms of cost feasibility for basic file storage.

Phil recommends cloud for virtual machines for pulling out the data from boxes under the desk

• need applications that are compatible
• cloud-based applications

Additional criteria

• uptake
• backend maintenance (in addition to production archival copy)
• files on disk

Issue - as soon as you export from a system to another system (ie. from lab notebook to an archive), you are creating a representation that isn’t usually round-tripable. So what exactly are you archiving? Tension between archival version and actual work.