Topic:

The use of free text documents, such as (laboratory) notebooks is limited because the notes are not machine-readable and searchable. Using electronic laboratory notebooks (ELNs) in combination with structured and defined metadata schema remedies this by making the research data findable, traceable, assignable to projects, and available for other researchers (even after the change of personnel). ELNs support the seamless data flow to repositories for research data sharing, publication and storing.

The RESOLV RDM Task Force explains the advantages of electronic lab notebooks in general and introduces the ELN Sciformation by means of a use case from organic chemistry.