This combination of immediate benefits to the science and engineering community, and vast long-term impact on collaboration and records management across a wide range of industries argues strongly for Electronic Notebook as among this years elite products in research and development. For hundreds of years, scientists and researchers have been using laboratory notebooks to document their work. Leonardo Da Vinci kept volumes of notebooks on all his ideas, data, calculations, and art. Today, scientists traditionally use paper notebooks to keep track of their experimental ideas, notes on experimental setups, observations, and research results. Industry researchers use notebooks to back up patent claims and record keeping for State and Federal regulations.
Medical researchers keep detailed records on patients, treatments, and outcomes.
An electronic notebook is a system to create, store, retrieve, and share fully electronic records in ways that meet all legal, regulatory, technical, and scientific requirements. As such it is much more than a web page or a Lotus Note. Federal regulations require many records to be archived for 25 years. The web was not even a dream 25 years ago and it is hard to predict what the interface to computer information will be like 25 years in the future. Digital signatures and tamper-proof electronic records have only recently been accepted as legally binding.