Target audience

Who is the target audience of the LabInform ELN? Is it interesting for me?

Scientists interested in reproducible research

Key to science is reproducibility of the results of others (including “past me”), i.e. independence of the results and conclusions from the individual scientist. This was always the case, but has become more pressing due to the increasing amount of (scientific) data produced. Part of this efforts towards reproducibility is scientific recordkeeping, usually in the natural sciences in form of laboratory notebooks (labbooks). While labbooks need not necessarily be electronic, documenting every step in science relevant for the results and conclusions drawn is crucial aspect of the scientific method as such. Labbooks are usually mostly involved in documenting data acquisition and displaying the primary results. Hence, the LabInform ELN aims at scientists (and all other people) in the laboratory involved in data acquisition and provides simple means to document this crucial aspect in the research and data life cycle.

Small academic groups with limited IT support

Large academic groups or the industry usually have a dedicated IT infrastructure and support providing them with ELN solutions and, what is crucially important, the capacity to adapt these software services to the local and dedicated needs. There is no such thing as a turn-key solution for ELNs. You always need to first understand the processes you want to map to a digital workflow and afterwards adapt an electronic system to your needs.

Small and particularly academic groups usually do not have the financial and personal capacity to buy and adapt commercial ELN solutions, let alone the intrinsic resistance to being forced into a certain workflow by external tools. Therefore, a solution with a small technological footprint that can be easily adapted by the scientists themselves to their individual needs is of great interest. This is what the LabInform ELN aims at providing.

Spectroscopists

Surely, the LabInform ELN is not limited to spectroscopists, but due to the background of its developers, it is mostly used in this context. What does this mean? While on the one hand, there is usually a set of methods available in a single spectroscopy laboratory, it is usually not routine measurements (as in analytics). Hence, every measurement requires some documentation. On the other hand, there is normally a clear relationship between a sample (the object to be investigated) and a measurement that gets documented in the ELN.