Position statement: Why use NotedELN?¶
There are any number of software packages available that implement electronic notebooks. So why should you choose NotedELN? NotedELN is for you if:
You want your notes to be stored in a human-readable format.
You want your notes to be stored in a format that will be easy to parse electronically even 500 years from now.
You want your notes to be protected against accidental deletion.
You want your notes to be automatically dated.
You want to concentrate on entering text and not on formatting.
You want to be able to include images and simple graphics with your notes and you want that to be easy.
You want your notebook software to be fast, even with thousands of pages of notes.
You like your software to be open-source so that you can make your own improvements to it, and be confident that you can still run it 20 years from now.
However, NotedELN may not be for you if:
You want complete control over the formatting of your notes. (NotedELN does enable basic formatting.)
You need to typeset complex equations in your notes. (NotedELN does have facilities for typesetting basic equations.)
You need to typeset music in your notes.
You need to import formatted documents into your notes. (NotedELN can archive web pages and pdf files for you, but they cannot be rendered onto the notebook pages.)
You need a help desk on-call.
A note on development¶
NotedELN is being developed by an active research scientist. Practically, that means two things: On the positive side, it means that I have a vested interest in fixing bugs and improving NotedELN, because I use it daily. On the negative side, it means that, by and large, new features are added only when I need them and bugs are fixed when I have time. I certainly do welcome feature requests, but I cannot guarantee that they will get implemented quickly or at all. (If you are in a hurry, I will consider (paid) consultancy related to NotedELN.) Finally, I definitely welcome contributions to either the code or the documentation. I would be very happy if NotedELN turned into a community-supported open source project.
Features¶
NotedELN notebooks consist of “entries” that fill one or more pages. Each entry has a title and consists of paragraphs of text, tables, and/or graphics canvases. Typesetting is deliberately simple: you can create italics and bold face text as well as super- and subscripts, but you cannot choose typefaces or font sizes (except as a global option). These limits were a conscious design choice: the hope is that this will force the user to concentrate on content rather than form, just as you would in a paper notebook.
Support for graphics follows the same philosophy: you can drag-and-drop or cut-and-paste images and (svg) vector graphics into a notebook entry, and these graphics can be cropped and resized. You can add simple symbols in a limited set of colors to the graphics as well as draw freehand lines. It is also possible to attach text notes to the graphics. You cannot, however, create arbitrarily complex graphics in NotedELN; for that, the author recommends using the GIMP, Krita, or Inkscape. It is easy to cut-and-paste from these programs into NotedELN, and even easier to simply grab screenshots and paste them into NotedELN.
NotedELN supports footnotes and references to other pages within the same notebook, and automatically downloads and archives web pages if you type their URL into a notebook entry. This, for instance, facilitates keeping data sheets, MSDSs, and journal articles with your notes.
A key feature of NotedELN is that each entry is stored in a separate file. (A notebook is a folder on your hard disk with these files in a subfolder.) This approach has numerous advantages:
It makes for fast editing regardless of the size of the notebook;
It limits the damage potential of hard disk corruption;
It makes it convenient to use external version control software to archive your notebooks (Git is best supported);
It facilitates electronically verifying when an entry was created; and
It makes it much easier to manually correct broken files if somehow data does get compromised [1].
Another important design feature is that entries automatically get locked (i.e., become immune to editing) after 24 hours [2]. This design choice might appear controversial, but it is an important feature for a lab notebook: it encourages (in fact, enforces), chronological note taking and preservation of history in experimental records [4] [3].
NotedELN does not, at present, offer any facilities for multi-user collaboration. However, if used in conjunction with version control software, it is not hard to automatically maintain a central library of many lab members’ notebooks. Lab members can then readily browse each others’ notebooks. In addition, NotedELN can export anything from an individual page to an entire notebook to pdf.