Electronic notebooks offer the power to create, save and search organisational data, enhance scientists' productivity and streamline daily record keeping
Scientists need to work smarter to manage the ever-increasing amount of work and literature that crosses their desks.
Perhaps even more importantly, time savings for an individual or small group may be compounded when applied to a team, department or corporate environment.
Electronic notebooks offer the power to create, save and search organisational data, enhance scientists' productivity and streamline daily record keeping, both of which provide the foundation for team solutions. The electronic notebook format makes it easy to manage diverse types of data, such as chemical structure drawings, spectra, notes and spreadsheets.
Collaboration among scientists is easier with electronic notebooks because multiple people in different geographic locations can access notebooks and pages, which can be stored in one centralised database.
Also, since the electronic notebook database is fully searchable by chemical structure, keywords, text and properties, scientists can find the information they need quickly, and as a result, make better decisions more quickly.
Electronic notebooks offer a tempting value proposition, with many opportunities to be cost effective, in addition to their knowledge management capabilities.
Much of this cost effectiveness has been documented by Censa (Collaborative Electronic Notebook Systems Association).
Part of the cost effectiveness is achieved by performing existing tasks more efficiently.
Another part results from using new capabilities that did not exist prior to the use of electronic notebooks.
For an individual scientist, it has been estimated that electronic notebooks facilitate existing tasks, such as avoiding repetitive entry in notebooks, importing data into notebooks, developing an index for notebooks in progress as well as those completed, simplifying report, paper and patent application generation, and referring to earlier notebooks for reference information.
Estimates show that these functions will save more than ten hours per month.
From a corporate perspective, it is estimated that existing tasks such as collaborative problem solving, new employee training, new project team member training, accessing former employee data, and patent and regulatory requests will produce similar time savings.
Although this savings is less quantifiable, it is still significant.
Using electronic notebooks in new ways may present even larger savings.
In a specific example, the need to prepare new graphics for project and team meetings can now be eliminated; Electronic notebooks allow simple access to legible notebook entries for presentation and discussion at meetings, and can be used directly at these meetings.
Thus, weekly or monthly meetings, all of which required preparation time in the past, now require less down-time for scientists.
In an industrial setting in the USA, assuming the annual costs of a fully loaded scientist are $150,000, it has been estimated that approximately $250,000 annually could be saved for a twenty person department.
While it is more difficult to assess the financial savings of an electronic notebook system for the academic community, the power to allow students and their advisers to share and communicate data quickly and effectively to guide research planning is substantial.
The premier driving force to use an electronic notebook is the tremendous power it brings to research and discovery knowledge management.
Savings in time (and money) are an immediate benefit to organisations, but the real benefits arise after several months of scientists creating a unique proprietary database of information that can be centrally stored, searched and shared.
E-Notebook is supplied and supported in the UK and Ireland by Adept Scientific.
