There is something about an Easter egg hunt that never gets old. How could it? A magical bunny that hides free, possibly limitless, chocolate in your garden. It is a chance to return to childhood, to squabble with your baby sister and snatch the biggest, chocolatiest bunny.
But, unfortunately, although wonderful, the search always ends with a feeling of frustration. There is inevitably that one chocolate egg that is impossible to find. You have spent two hours combing the garden, carefully checking behind each and every garden gnome, your knees muddy and bruised, your body exhausted – even mom does not know where it is. Then, fast-forward to June when dad is mowing the lawn. There is a clunk, a judder in the machinery, a silver wrapper, but alas, the chocolate that remains is inedible and unsalvageable.
While some may disagree, there are more important things that can be lost apart from chocolate … like data! Even the most organized people find it hard to keep track of their experiment records, in fact, data is lost at a rate of 80% every 20 years¹. Sadly, as of yet, magical rodents seem only capable of conjuring up chocolate and have not advanced to scientific results. This means lost research that takes time, effort and careful planning, could be worth even more than misplaced confectionery.
But organizing and retaining information is one of the many ways that the labfolder platform can make your research a whole lot easier. It is no longer necessary to rifle through paper lab notebooks in a panic, foraging for that blurred sketch that could explain X, only to discover that all-important drawing is in another notebook you left on the bus. Digitizing your data means that never again will you lose any documents, everything is saved.
Not only can all this material be recovered, but specific entries and projects can also be quickly recalled using the search and filter options. The information can be sorted according to project, author, date and tags. labfolder reduces the time spent hunting and sorting through data; time and effort can instead be dedicated to valuable research.
Search with keywords
Filter through your data with tags
So, this weekend when you are desperately searching on your hands and knees, the kids are on the brink of tears, and you know that Easter egg is there somewhere, think how fantastic it would be, if only you could just type “chocolate” into a search bar and for it to appear right in front of your eyes. Data retrieval is almost as magical as the Easter Bunny itself.
1http://www.nature.com/news/scientists-losing-data-at-a-rapid-rate-1.14416
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