In 2000 I co-founded a chemical informatics company called Synthematix. We built a pretty good ELN we sold to places like GSK, AmGen and many small biotech companies. As a software engineer and not with a chemistry background, I was kind of shocked at how ancient the industry was with paper notebooks and microfiche archives still the norm. But while ELNs were much better for some purposes they were still too clunky for many others. I imagine that with AI now you can have the best of both worlds. Paper notebooks, or whatever the scientist wants for their purposes, but then smart scanning and archiving/search for institutional purposes.
As someone who has had to swap over to digital ELNs due to the NIH directive, I really dislike the inflexibility that is touched on in the article! Especially for the specific software we're contracted with (LabArchives). I will often sketch out diagrams or brainstorm data interpretation messily on the page, whereas Lab Archives incentivizes simple text and file uploads. It's so icky, I have definitely ended up with the "waste book" paradigm already.
Would love an extension of this article with a focus on Darwin's notebooks. In The Tangled Tree by David Quammen, he describes how Darwin would name his notebooks as Notebook A, B, C etc. And the very famous notebook sketches in which his initial ideas on evolution and branching of species had taken shape.
In 2000 I co-founded a chemical informatics company called Synthematix. We built a pretty good ELN we sold to places like GSK, AmGen and many small biotech companies. As a software engineer and not with a chemistry background, I was kind of shocked at how ancient the industry was with paper notebooks and microfiche archives still the norm. But while ELNs were much better for some purposes they were still too clunky for many others. I imagine that with AI now you can have the best of both worlds. Paper notebooks, or whatever the scientist wants for their purposes, but then smart scanning and archiving/search for institutional purposes.
that's super cool, thank you for sharing! And yes, AI could indeed be a bridge between the raw paper notebooks and digital archiving.
As someone who has had to swap over to digital ELNs due to the NIH directive, I really dislike the inflexibility that is touched on in the article! Especially for the specific software we're contracted with (LabArchives). I will often sketch out diagrams or brainstorm data interpretation messily on the page, whereas Lab Archives incentivizes simple text and file uploads. It's so icky, I have definitely ended up with the "waste book" paradigm already.
I had the same experience in my lab with LabArchives!
Would love an extension of this article with a focus on Darwin's notebooks. In The Tangled Tree by David Quammen, he describes how Darwin would name his notebooks as Notebook A, B, C etc. And the very famous notebook sketches in which his initial ideas on evolution and branching of species had taken shape.
there’s a chapter on Darwin’s notebooks in Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper
https://citylights.com/print-culture/notebook-hist-of-thinking-on-paper/
I just realized Ray’s empirical observations to contradict one’s claim is kinda like Community Notes on X to fact check others.