Benefits To Scientists, Engineers, and Other Technical People

The most important benefits to scientists, engineers, and other technical people from CENSA are improved information handling tools that help them focus on their primary missions and goals of discovery, invention, and product development, rather than tedious clerical or recordkeeping tasks.  CENSA's programs to implement fully electronic recordkeeping systems and electronic notebook systems throughout the CENSA member organizations will increase their productivity by eliminating countless hours of recordkeeping tasks, increase the quality of their work, and give technical people much greater access to the intellectual output of everyone in the organization.  

Sometimes concerns arise about privacy of one's work, i.e., premature release of ideas can damage the awarding of credit to an inventor.  In CENSA, we recognize this privacy issue as one that must be addressed before technical people accept a system.   The necessary system controls to protect the privacy of one's work until the author deems it ready for release to peers or the broader community within the organization are a fundamental system requirement for a system to succeed. 

What electronic system features give major advantages?

  Replacing the need to "cut and paste" information into paper notebooks with "electronic scissors and tape" functionality.  Allows easy and direct capture of information from all common desktop and server applications in use today.

  Eliminating the tedious and repetitive tasks of building notebook indexes and tables of contents.  In the electronic environment, these must be generated automatically from experiment header and keyword information.

  Reducing the tedium and redundancy of converting, rekeying and reformatting electronic data and protocols by giving scientists more seamless electronic data environments.  Better and smarter data integration tools for end users will make this possible.

  Preventing users from losing information that was difficult to search for or share when stored in paper format. This is a big waste of corporate intellectual property and investments!  There is a need for full-text indexing and Content-Based Retrieval (CBR) for all information held in recordbooks, including chemical structures, spectra, documents, DNA and protein structures, and other information.

  Alleviating storage capacity concerns.  Paper notebooks and databooks cannot handle terabytes of data generated by modern experiments such as High-Throughput Screening (HTS), 2-D and 3-D NMR and mass spectrometry, molecular modeling and visualization.  With HTS beginning to dominate drug and biotech research, we still do not have acceptable solutions for recordkeeping.

  Providing notebook bases, project data stores, and multidatabase search tools will enable new project team members to bring themselves up to speed quickly and learn what’s already been done. This can easily cut project startup times by days to weeks.