{"id":2943,"date":"2008-09-17T11:57:39","date_gmt":"2008-09-17T11:57:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/09\/17\/open-lab-notebook-software\/"},"modified":"2008-09-17T11:57:39","modified_gmt":"2008-09-17T11:57:39","slug":"open-lab-notebook-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/09\/17\/open-lab-notebook-software\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Lab Notebook Software?"},"content":{"rendered":"

After talking to Cameron Neylon<\/a> last week, I’m strongly considering setting up an online lab notebook for my research lab. Not so much for the philosophical reasons having to do with openness and the like– as a practical matter, I still don’t think my data will do anybody any good– but for reasons of sheer convenience. Having the lab notebook on the web will allow me to keep tabs on what’s going on during the next few months when I’m going to be spending a lot of time at home with SteelyKid.<\/p>\n

The one catch is, the system Neylon uses for his lab blog<\/a> is optimized for, well, a biochemist– someone who has a fixed set of instruments, and mostly just needs to keep track of what samples were fed into what instruments. The work I have going on at the moment is largely apparatus construction, and thus the existing lab-blogging tools don’t work terribly well to capture what’s going on.<\/p>\n

Specifically, I would like a way to easily include small drawings– block diagrams of the apparatus, beam line sketches, and so on. I posted pictures of pages from the lab book<\/a> a couple of years ago, and that’s fairly typical stuff.<\/p>\n

So, a question for the audience here, many of whom have more knowledge of this sort of thing than I do: Are there tools out there that do what I need already? Specifically, I would like the ability to make small electronic drawings of the lab apparatus (basically, the tool set available in Paint or Word would be fine), and post them to a lab-book blog in a relatively seamless way (where “relatively seamless” involves fewer steps than making the drawing in Paint, exporting it as a .jpg, uploading it to a blog server, and pasting the link into a file).<\/p>\n

I’m looking into the possibility of getting a local CS student to put something together as a student project, but if there’s some cheap and easy pre-existing solution that would work as an interim measure, until I can get something custom made, I’d love to know about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After talking to Cameron Neylon last week, I’m strongly considering setting up an online lab notebook for my research lab. Not so much for the philosophical reasons having to do with openness and the like– as a practical matter, I still don’t think my data will do anybody any good– but for reasons of sheer… Continue reading Open Lab Notebook Software?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2943\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}