Paper notebooks are regularly used by scientists, engineers, and technicians to keep records of their observations, analysis and conclusions. As researchers remotely collaborate in performing experiments, controlling instruments of on-line facilities, designing large-scale systems, or in a variety of laboratory and scientific discovery processes, they face the management of large amounts of data, personal paper notebooks, electronic mail, phone conferencing discussions, and collections of documents and multimedia files. In addition, collaborating researchers may use collected data to produce images and plots that are shared with colleagues in discussions of obtained results.

Electronic notebooks are used to capture, store, and manage a variety of data obtained through data acquisition and data analysis processes. In collaborative work, electronic notebooks offer remote collaborators the capability of sharing data and of creating annotations on the shared data, both synchronously and asynchronously. Electronic notebooks are also important in collaborative work because they are used to manage the persistent historical record of group discussions, meetings, decisions, and conclusions reached by project team members. Moreover, electronic notebooks enhance science and engineering inquiry processes by providing powerful searching capabilities of diverse database information related to a collaborative project.

In this talk we will summarize the main ideas regarding electronic notebooks for collaborative work, review related work, and then focus on the development of an experimental electronic notebook for the Spectro-Microscopy Collaboratory at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) in LBNL. We will discuss the architecture of the electronic notebook system, its current implementation, lessons learned, and future directions.

The slides for this seminar are available for viewing at: