iLabNotebook

Dates

February 2003 — January 2004

Principal Investigator

Patrick A. Anquetil (PI) with Andrew Taberner, Bryan Crane, Laura Proctor, Peter Madden, and Rachel Zimet

Problem

Traditional laboratory (i.e. paper) notebooks are static, making it difficult to share information with colleagues and to add electronic media to supplement notes.

Goal

To create an electronic laboratory notebook using the TabletPC platform.

Overview

The laboratory environment provides an ideal place for evaluating new technologies and experimenting with revolutionary concepts of conducting research. This project uses TabletPC computers powered by Microsoft Windows XP as centralized and streamlined information systems to help scientists in their daily work of acquiring, storing and distributing information.

A typical task for a laboratory researcher consists of keeping daily records of his/her experiments in a lab notebook. Such a lab notebook contains descriptions of experimental setup, experimental data, chemical formulas, recipes, etc. — all the necessary information colleagues use to reproduce his/her experiments. These records also have a high value for the laboratory, as their collection represents the entire lab knowledge base.

Classical lab notebooks have a major limitation:   what goes into the lab notebook stays in the lab notebook. Just getting the information into the lab notebook in the first place is problematic. A digital user interface is much more appropriate to support such processes. An electronic prototype of the laboratory notebook is being developed and tested in this project. See the iLabNotebook web site (URL below) to view work in progress.

Links