Content area
Full Text
Converting paper records to digital formats provides secure back-ups that researchers can access from anywhere. By Anna Nowogrodzki
When the coronavirus pandemic closed the University of Minnesota in St Paul, plant pathologist Linda Kinkel's laboratory team cast around for tasks they could do from home. They realized there was onejob they'd wanted to do for some time: digitizing the team's 30-year-old collection of paper lab notebooks. "COVID really was what made us commit to the digital lab notebooks," says technician Andrew Mann. "All of us being alone and needing access to former students' experiments so we can write grants and plan our next experiments."
Research groups digitize their old lab notebooks for a host of reasons. Digital records can be backed up so they are impervious to floods and fires, and encrypted to protect them from theft. They require no physical space, and can be used by multiple team members at the same time from different locations. The scanning process makes the text readable, accessible and suitable for archiving; if the software includes optical character recognition (OCR), scanned typewritten text can also generally be searched - although OCR is not error-free, so the resulting text often needs manual correction.
Some researchers scan notebooks using smartphone apps or physical scanners; others outsource the work to specialized companies. "Digitization is on the increase, especially after COVID," says Jan Cahill, marketing director at Cleardata, near Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, which digitizes books and documents. Lab closures because of pandemic restrictions have highlighted the benefits of having documents remotely accessible by every team member simultaneously, Mann says. For Glenn Lockwood, a computer scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, digitization was about providing peace of mind. "Itjust helps me sleep better at night," he says.
Smart use of smartphones
Mann and his colleagues have taken a no-frills approach to digitizing their old notebooks: they use their smartphones. The collection includes dozens of bound, standard-sized lab notebooks with yellow paper and red covers, and each team member took a few home when the lab closed at the start of the pandemic restrictions. Scanning each page with a smartphone isn't fast, but because every lab member has one, it is efficient: there's never a queue to access a...