From: Chris Morris
Date: 25 January 2012 09:37
Tassos reports:
> 1. None of the twenty test-users was satisfied with any of the two
> solutions - and each was annoyed for a different reason.
This suggests that the choice of ELN is not the most difficult part of the adoption process. Maybe the test users at the NKI were annoyed by the idea of using an ELN at all.
In my experience, the hardest part is ensuring that it provides benefits to the people who have to enter the data, and provides them early. The fact that it will make information retrieval easier in three years is not enough.
I suggest focussing on electronic support for housekeeping: booking time on an instrument, finding the files the instrument created, ordering oligos, recording when you use the last of a reagent. Scientists work very independently in most respects, but they do have certain obligations that flow from sharing the lab space. You can make use of these to encourage compliance with the ELN. If you do, then most of the science will get recorded in passing.
I suggest also ensuring that it includes electronic tools that actually help. Two examples from PiMS are primer design, and automatically uploading and interpreting results from the Caliper GX instrument.
It must allow round trips with spreadsheets, i.e. dump ELN data as a spreadsheet, edit it, upload it again. Despite their substantial disadvantages, some scientists will not give them up. It should also allow crossreferencing with paper note books. Some will continue to use a lab notebook. When they discover that the ELN serves as a searchable index to it, they will warm to the ELN.
I suggest aiming for "no paper" at your lab progress meetings within say 12 months. When you reach that point, everything important is in the ELN. Before then, the ELN is not giving real value.
You will need someone who is keen on the introduction of the ELN, to customise it, provide first line user support, and act as a single point of contact with the supplier. This might be a scientist or an IT person. I have also seen this done well by a technician, Delphine Chesnel when she was at the EMBL Hamburg. If you can't find such a "champion", then introduction will not be successful.
Some of the problem here is an "own goal" by the community: scientists are trained to use paper during their degrees, so ELNs are a controversial change of practice. One person who, unusually, began with an ELN told me how inconvenient it is now she works in a paper-based lab.
PepTalk 2012 had a workshop on this topic. The recording and notes are here:
http://www.structuralbiology.eu/support/forums/networks/pims/why-dont-scientists-use-limselns
regards,
Chris
____________________________________________
Chris Morris
----------
From: Anastassis Perrakis
----------
From: Phoebe Rice
As the proud owner of a carefully organized, highly annotated VMS backup tape (reel-to-reel, of course), my main concern is that paper is the only format that we'll be able to count on reading a decade (or more) from now.
=====================================
Phoebe A. Rice
Date: 25 January 2012 09:37
Tassos reports:
> 1. None of the twenty test-users was satisfied with any of the two
> solutions - and each was annoyed for a different reason.
This suggests that the choice of ELN is not the most difficult part of the adoption process. Maybe the test users at the NKI were annoyed by the idea of using an ELN at all.
In my experience, the hardest part is ensuring that it provides benefits to the people who have to enter the data, and provides them early. The fact that it will make information retrieval easier in three years is not enough.
I suggest focussing on electronic support for housekeeping: booking time on an instrument, finding the files the instrument created, ordering oligos, recording when you use the last of a reagent. Scientists work very independently in most respects, but they do have certain obligations that flow from sharing the lab space. You can make use of these to encourage compliance with the ELN. If you do, then most of the science will get recorded in passing.
I suggest also ensuring that it includes electronic tools that actually help. Two examples from PiMS are primer design, and automatically uploading and interpreting results from the Caliper GX instrument.
It must allow round trips with spreadsheets, i.e. dump ELN data as a spreadsheet, edit it, upload it again. Despite their substantial disadvantages, some scientists will not give them up. It should also allow crossreferencing with paper note books. Some will continue to use a lab notebook. When they discover that the ELN serves as a searchable index to it, they will warm to the ELN.
I suggest aiming for "no paper" at your lab progress meetings within say 12 months. When you reach that point, everything important is in the ELN. Before then, the ELN is not giving real value.
You will need someone who is keen on the introduction of the ELN, to customise it, provide first line user support, and act as a single point of contact with the supplier. This might be a scientist or an IT person. I have also seen this done well by a technician, Delphine Chesnel when she was at the EMBL Hamburg. If you can't find such a "champion", then introduction will not be successful.
Some of the problem here is an "own goal" by the community: scientists are trained to use paper during their degrees, so ELNs are a controversial change of practice. One person who, unusually, began with an ELN told me how inconvenient it is now she works in a paper-based lab.
PepTalk 2012 had a workshop on this topic. The recording and notes are here:
http://www.structuralbiology.eu/support/forums/networks/pims/why-dont-scientists-use-limselns
regards,
Chris
____________________________________________
Chris Morris
----------
From: Anastassis Perrakis
I think that all these points are interesting and valid.
That would surely apply to some users. Some were actually very keen, and thats why they signed up for it.
I think that this was exactly one of the problems. The ELNs we tested had no option for booking instruments, no way to find files from instruments let alone read them (it would support only TIF, JPEG, Doc, XLS, PDF), and would not do stock keeping: all these are thought to be out of the ELN scope. And that makes an ELN inherently less useful.
Lack of instrument support is another issue: a machine that would allow us to import real chromatograms to ELN would be cool - alas, the solution that was suggested to us is to save as PDF or XLS and reload ...! (it took 3 weeks to come back with this great plan!)
For the rest I have nothing much to say, I basically agree.
----------
From: Phoebe Rice
As the proud owner of a carefully organized, highly annotated VMS backup tape (reel-to-reel, of course), my main concern is that paper is the only format that we'll be able to count on reading a decade (or more) from now.
=====================================
Phoebe A. Rice
----------
From: Dale Tronrud
Unless you have written on the paper using cursive script. Many schools
in the US have stopped teaching longhand reading/writing so in a generation
or two many paper records will be undecipherable to all but historians. My
wife has some handwritten letters from ancestors written in German around
1920 that even Germans have great trouble reading today.
The paper is holding up quite well though. ;-)
Dale Tronrud
----------
From: Jacob Keller
Can't you get a plug-in for that?
JPK
--
No comments:
Post a Comment