Electronic Laboratory Notebooks

Laboratory notebooks are essential for documenting the planning, execution, and evaluation of scientific experiments. They facilitate location-independent and collaborative work in the laboratory. In relevant disciplines, they are essential for Good Scientific Practice (Guidelines for Ensuring Good Scientific Practice: "Continuous, research-related quality assurance refers (...) to the maintenance of laboratory notebooks.") and research data management.

The University of Hamburg offers the open source software elabFTW. All members can log in with their user ID. Individual users can start right away, and so-called teams can be set up for groups.

With this software you can:

• Describe experiments in a structured manner, e.g., with information on
  • the experimental procedure
  • the materials and instruments used
  • observations made during the experiment (including attachments such as photos)
  • Metadata/descriptions of the data generated in the experiment and, if applicable, the files (or links to them) and the associated conclusions
• Import, export, and visualize data
• Use APIs (application programming interfaces) to connect with other software systems
• Ensure long-term retention and access to all this information.

Official manual, documentation/FAQ and Youtube channel of eLabFTW. 

In the near future, instructions for individual steps and a FAQ will follow for the UHH, similar to here and here.  

The CRDM is the central contact point and is happy to provide support, for example, to create a new team in eLabFTW. Please contact us by email at forschungsdaten@uni-hamburg.de(forschungsdaten"AT"uni-hamburg.de?subject=eLabFTW)