Digital dilemmas
Lab 4. 0 is double-edged, notes Matthew Partridge.
So, a large part of my role over the last 12 months has been helping out with an Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) rollout and development in my department which I’ve married up to a new centralised Lab Inventory Management System (LIMS) and a custom-built digital Health and Safety system. All work fantastically together, or at least work a lot better than their acronym ELNLIMSHS, which sounds more like a sneeze than something to help research.
As you might expect of someone who has spent 12 months nose deep in electronic lab systems, I’m a big proponent of ‘going digital’ in labs. I have been since my very first lab job, where I realised the power of Excel tables. I’ve been an early adopter of everything from lab scheduling systems to lab twin prototypes and lab monitoring systems. My first Alexa was set up in my lab, mostly answering embarrassingly basic maths questions.
My enthusiasm for early adoption has waned over the years. I’ve been burnt so many times by small, plucky digital science tools that have suddenly vanished or suspended support that it’s amazing I’m still willing to turn on a computer, let alone put my science on it.I once spent days creating a virtual lab with all my equipment nicely photographed and documented. The plan was to make my lab more visible online and to try to work with other labs loaning our equipment and services. Just after completion they posted an update, saying they were abandoning the project.
For me, search is the hero of labs turning digital. Full-text search across results, notes, attachments and materials has saved me days of rummaging
As my enthusiasm waned, the number of large, established digital services grew. Now I can sign up to try out projects that are 10-plus years old and have hundreds of contributors. Even the ones that fade or fail are often well supported with end-of-life or compatibility solutions that have allowed me to continue.
Sadly though, my note-taking has not magically become the tidy opus I always hoped it would become. I still jot things such as “fix later” and “check maths?”, only now they’re in an ELN with a timestamp that proves just how long “later” has been. At least they are now legible and linked to the right data. Which is a huge step up from the paper era where notes were equally thin but indecipherable and linked only to their experiments by stain.
For me, search is the hero of labs turning digital. Full-text search across results, notes, attachments and materials has saved me days of rummaging. I can type “acetate 2019 weird peak” and be staring at the exact run, the sample lot it came from and a comment from past-me that reads “column rubbish”. While it’s still got a long way to go, OCR even finds useful words out of my hurried note photos and labels. I genuinely don’t miss flipping through a lab book praying my memory of the page colour will somehow guide me.
But one thing that still amazes me is that, with all the digital systems I’ve used and all those I now rely on for my work, my first instinct is to ask: “How can I make/do this in Excel?”
Dr Matthew Partridge is senior enterprise fellow and director of outreach at the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, University of Southampton. He also draws silly cartoons as ErrantScience
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