Logs, Blog, and Pods: Laboratory Notebooks for the next generation

Keeping a proper scientific record of experiments is hard. Research now involves much material that is produced digitally, but the understanding of the material is only possible when the researchers notes are available and often the link between the data files and the written notes does not survive for long. Using a number of the outputs from the UK e-Science programme to provide much more useful electronic notebooks to facilitate the task of creating and sharing a full scientific record and incorporating the use of data and document repositories. I will describe the use we are making of a semantic electronic laboratory notebook (ELN), the very flexible Laboratory Blog system, used both as an ELN and a collaboration tool and repositories to facilitate the motion of chemical information round its lifecycle.