An electronic lab notebook is basically a computer program created to replace regular paper lab notebooks. Lab notebooks by nature are usually used by engineers, scientists, and other professionals to record important research, laboratory procedures, and experiments done in an organization’s laboratory. However, as the E-Book has gained popularity among scientists, this traditional method of lab notebook keeping is now becoming less effective and time consuming.
The most common use of a lab notebook includes recording data acquired from experiments done in the laboratory. E-Book writing is considered as a part of scientific writing since the writer of the E-Book has to be able to understand and write accurately about the scientific material being included in the report. This includes descriptions and explanations of laboratory methods, results obtained from experiments, data analysis methods and results of laboratory experiments. This is to ensure accuracy in the scientific information being included in the report.
A typical lab notebook can easily contain several pages of written data. Some people prefer to organize their notebooks by types of experiments or laboratory procedures. For example, some people have categories such as DNA analysis experiments, DNA manipulation experiments, polymerase chain reaction experiments, cell biology experiments, microorganisms experiments, chemical structure experiments, etc. In this way, they will not only be able to identify their laboratory materials better, but also make it easier for them to refer to these laboratory materials when they need to do other experiments in future.
There are also people who prefer to create an electronic notebook from scratch. They may create one using pre-existing information or obtain and copy information from books or online resources. Since E-Book writing may require creativity and thorough understanding of the scientific information, it would be ideal if you can write your own E-Book.
In creating an electronic notebook, the first step is choosing the topic to be included in the E-Book. Choose an appropriate topic that is interesting and of high quality. Also, choose the topic with a clear description and explanation of the scientific information that you are about to include in the E-Book. It would be a waste of time and effort to write an E-Book if there is no proper explanation of what is contained in it.
Lab notebooks may also be printed out so that they can be shared among other members in an organization. This means that any member can easily reference the information gathered in the lab notebooks. thus making the entire lab much easier to access.
