Let’s get digital! | Part 1: Data Integration

There is some beautiful simplicity about the Paper Lab Notebook. You can hold it, feel the soft, soft touch of paper against your fingers, turning one sheet slowly after another. The smell of fresh ink combined with the sweet rustling of pages are sensations that transport you back to the good old days when 4-year-olds didn’t know how to use iPads and a cloud was something gray and puffy in the sky.

But the question is, is it ever possible to let go of the classical paper and leap into the new digital world?

In our new blog series, “Let’s get digital”, we want to demonstrate how you can take your paper lab notebook and easily translate it into a digital format. And, it goes further than translating – we also want to show the extra advantages that digitizing your data can bring.

This week, we are concentrating on data integration, to learn how to make adding data to a digital lab notebook just as simple as sticking it in with scissors and glue.

Let’s take a look at the life cycle of data in a paper lab notebook:

The cycle of data on paper:

Though it works, why keep switching from digital to paper to digital? All your data could stay digital, making reusing and sharing it quicker. Keeping data digital greatly reduces human error – less copying means fewer mistakes and a digital format makes bad handwriting a thing of the past. What’s more, there is only one place to look for all your data records, rather than shifting between digital to paper to digital again.

The cycle of data with labfolder:

With labfolder, there is less ink wasted, better quality images and less room for human error. Data can be uploaded directly from your phone using our mobile apps or afterwards from your computer. Data will be integrated into your experiment layout, meaning that there is less searching through files and folders as there is only one place to look for all the relevant information. You can annotate your data within the platform using our sketching and labeling tool and share it with other team members automatically or in just a few clicks.

So much data is already digital anyway so why not take it one step further by making your lab notebook digital?

Ready to make the change from paper to digital?

TRY LABFOLDER TODAY