Alternative to Tablet PC for ELN (electronic lab notebook)

[midknightr]

For those afraid of computers or so attached to pen and paper they can't change to an all electronic lab notebook, there is a review on a magic pen that gives you the Onenote benefits (organization, searchability,...) while still letting you doodle away with paper and pen.

http://e-lab-book.com/?p=372

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Cool! I think within the next 10 years we'll see a bigger focus and demand for tablet PCs as they get thinner and lighter.

 

[rescentris]

Although Electronic Lab Notebooks were initially used in chemistry, every field of research, including physics, will probably adopt them as standard or required eventually. Many scientific funding bodies already recommend them, and it's only a matter of time before they are required because of the intellectual property protection and time / date / digital signature audit information that they provide. This information gives the parent organization or funding body peace of mind and facilitates proper accountability. It also protects valuable data indefinitely and makes it easier for others to subsequently locate, confirm, and build upon it. ELN's are evolving rapidly to meet the needs of mobile computing, even since the original post in this thread. The CERF ELN solution by Rescentris now offers a version of a dedicated CERF for iPad app / iPhone, and Rescentris plans to extend the functionality of this app quickly. CERF also has available integration with the livescribe smart pen, and an email-to-CERF feature that allows any mobile devices to send entries (including image or voice note attachments) to the the user's secure ELN server from any location with wireless network access. In terms of suitability for research in physics labs, CERF can ingest and make sense of absolutely any file, folder, package or other digital asset, in any format, from any instrument, no matter how specialized the data. CERF also offers customizable semantic ontologies and automatic creation and search of semantic metadata, such that scientists working in any discipline or even multidisciplinary research can identify, tag, locate and manage data in ways that were impossible in the more rigid ELNs developed for use in just one field.