If it seems to you like we've been hearing about the "paperless laboratory" and Electronic Laboratory Notebooks for many years, then you're not alone. ELNs have been long promised but always "about to become practical". Well, that's changing and if your organization isn't developing an ELN strategy, then you're at risk of falling behind the curve. ELNs are here and being implemented by mainstream organizations, not just early "bleeding edge" adopters. To learn more about this, The Lab Man talked to Michael Elliott, CEO of Atrium Research and long-time expert in the field of laboratory informatics.

As to why ELNs are finally beginning to take off, Michael indicates that the key development occurred several years ago when ELN vendors began to develop domain specific products, such as for synthetic chemistry. By focusing functionality on specific domain niches, these products finally offered scientists a tool that they could identify with and could actually use to improve their workflow and productivity, rather than just serve as an electronic repository for data. As these early-targeted domain groups began using ELNs, it got the attention of their colleagues in other domains, and now the implementation is spreading.

For many years, a big concern about ELNs was whether the data format would stand up to legal patent challenges as well as paper notebooks. According to Michael, the question of the admissibility of electronic records in a court of law has now been clearly settled. United States federal rules of civil procedure now give electronic vs. paper records equal weight, provided that proper authentication and integrity checks exist. There has yet to be a court patent challenge involving actual ELN data, but there has been a patent case which successfully used an email as evidence. It should go without saying that organizations using ELNs still must maintain proper record management and retention practices.

The Lab Man would like to think that recent efforts toward data interchange standards (ANDI protocols, the AnIML schema) might have lead to ELN products that make it possible, dare we say easy, to share electronic notebook data within and across organizations. Alas, as so often seems to be the case in laboratory automation, we are not there yet. Michael feels that there hasn't been sufficient push from ELN buyers for standardization, so the vendor community hasn't focused on the use of standards like AnIML. At best, they offer some ELN interoperability among their various domain-specific products, but cross-vendor interoperability has not received much attention. The various ELN vendors are often better at addressing the needs of a given domain group (i.e. biology vs. chemistry), but if an organization chooses the "best" ELN for each domain group, they sacrifice much chance for ELN interoperability across the entire organization. Even if data interchange standards were fully implemented, the lack of common terminology across functional groups and organizations still looms as a large issue.

If (when) your organization begins to consider ELNs, Michael recommends several points. First, is to understand that ELNs do not represent a simple replacement of paper notebooks. ELNs represent part of a larger informatics puzzle. An organization implementing ELNs should have an overall informatics strategy or vision, and should understand their data flows. They need to identify their data-related operational issues and then develop a roadmap to address those issues. Secondly, an organization must have a strategy for change management when actually implementing an ELN (or any automation solutions for that matter). A tool like an ELN is only as good as the amount of data that goes into it, meaning that it must be used by the scientists to be successful.

So, are YOU ready for ELNs? They're coming your way soon, if not already there!

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto!