Building a Smart Laboratory 2012 Laboratory automation and laboratory informatics An ELN can serve the organisation in


three ways: firstly, it can take advantage of the capabilities of IT to improve the ability to acquire, manipulate, share and store data (productivity). Secondly, it can facilitate communication and sharing in real time across multi-disciplinary and multi-site teams (collaboration). Tirdly, it can provide a scientific knowledge repository that can be easily accessed to recover records of the lab’s work (content/knowledge management). Te way in which lab notebooks are used


is largely dictated by the United States’ patent system which, unlike the rest of the world, is based on ‘First to Invent’. Te need to be able to demonstrate who really was first to invent requires the laboratory notebook to be an authentic and trustworthy record that describes the concept and it’s reduction to practice, and is signed by the author and corroborated by an impartial witness. Te reason why the migration away from


paper lab notebooks has taken so long can most likely be attributed to two factors: the reluctance of lawyers and patent attorneys to gamble on the legal acceptance of electronic records in patent interferences and patent


litigation without any case law, and the lack of confidence in our ability to preserve electronic records over several decades. One of the more challenging barriers to


a successful electronic laboratory notebook implementation is identifying exactly what role the ELN will play. Te term ‘electronic laboratory notebook’ is inherently ambiguous. In most cases the implementation of an ELN is expected to do more than just replace the paper lab notebook. Te paper lab notebook is a simple authoring tool and any electronic authoring tool capable of generating a compound document will serve as a replacement. For some companies this has proved to be the case. Te combination of Microsoſt Office,


SharePoint services and a means of preserving documents (e.g. in PDF – portable document format) has been shown to be an adequate replacement for paper. But if more functionality than this is needed, for example integrating various chemistry or biology- centric functions or other discipline-specific tools, then we are really talking about an electronic laboratory rather than an electronic laboratory notebook.


Fig. 4: Broad vs. Deep


Broad Functions Records, Patents,


Cross-discipline collaboration


Chemists Biologists Analysts


Other discipline Other discipline


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