Rethinking Laboratory Notebooks
We take digitalization of laboratory work practice as a challenging design domain to explore. There are obvious drawbacks with the use of paper instead of ICT in the collaborative writing that takes place in laboratory notebooks; yet paper persist in bein
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Abstract We take digitalization of laboratory work practice as a challenging design domain to explore. There are obvious drawbacks with the use of paper instead of ICT in the collaborative writing that takes place in laboratory notebooks; yet paper persist in being the most common solution. The ultimate aim with our study is to produce design relevant knowledge that can envisage an ICT solution that keeps as many advantages of paper as possible, but with the strength of electronic laboratory notebooks as well. Rather than assuming that users are technophobic and unable to appropriate state of the art software, we explore whether there are something inherent in current ICT infrastructure that invites resistance from the users. The method used is interviews, combined with a modified version of future workshops and the data are analyzed with activity theory. Our results concern issues of configurability, mobility, and the barrier between documentation and control, amongst other things.
Introduction IT tools give an obvious advantage over the analogue counterpart for our inscriptionbased activities in many aspects of our everyday life. We write our papers, manipulate images, create music and build detailed three-dimensional models with the hassles of doing it by hand long forgotten. Computer supported collaboration with inscriptions have many success stories; Wikipedia is but one of them.
C.N. Klokmose (*) and P.-O. Zander Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University, Aabogade 34, 8200 Aarhus N, Denmark e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] C.N. Klokmose Laboratorie de Recherche en Informatique, Université Paris-Sud, Bâtiment 490, F-91405 Orsay, France e-mail: [email protected]
M. Lewkowicz et al. (eds.), Proceedings of COOP 2010, DOI 10.1007/978-1-84996-211-7_8, © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2010
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However, there are some domains where the flexibility of paper seemingly overweighs the benefits of digital solutions. An example is laboratory notebooks, which are interesting, because many laboratory workers are highly computer literate, autonomous, thus some form of computer illiteracy or unwillingness to experiment cannot explain their resistance to collaboration technology. This was a main reason to conduct a case study on the work practice of laboratory notebooks and work in a Physics and Astronomy department. Systems for electronic laboratory notebooks (ELN) are beginning to emerge especially in the biochemistry and pharmaceutical industry. But in the academic research laboratories around the globe the paper-based laboratory notebook is still the referential source of documentation [1, 2]. However, given the increasing complexity of modern research, and the computerisation of the majority of the experimental equipment the traditional paper-based laboratory notebook is beginning to age. Paper has a number of advantages in the context of laboratory notebooks: It is lightweight, ubiquitous, cheap, and easy to use [3, 4]. Sometimes legislation has a favourable view on pa
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