Collaborative Electronic Notebooks as Electronic Records: Design Issues for the Secure Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN)

Current electronic notebooks (EN) can be grouped roughly into two general classes—personal/group productivity tools and enterprise records/knowledge management systems. Personal/group productivityoriented ENs extend the notebook metaphor in terms of supporting multimedia annotations, automating workflow and data processing, supporting simultaneous use by distributed researchers, providing displays on personal digital assistants (PDA), etc. Enterprise records/ knowledge management-oriented ENs tend to limit content to static, paper-like documents (e.g., saved in portable document format [pdf] using Adobe Acrobat) and to emphasize searching, digital signatures, and enterprise-level management functionality. A variety of complex technical and business issues make it difficult to bridge the gap between these types of ENs. The latest version of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s (PNNL) Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN) incorporates a variety of features for both personal and group productivity as well as records management, thereby providing an example of how such capabilities might be combined to meet the needs of individual researchers and their organizations. This paper outlines the issues involved in using ENs as records, discusses the design choices made in the ELN to address these issues while maintaining a focus on collaboration and researcher productivity, and highlights additional areas where conflicts between productivity and records functionality remain and would have to be resolved, via technology and/or policy, to successfully use the ELN as an official record. 1 This manuscript was written by an employee of Battelle Memorial Institute, which operates Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC06-76RL