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Electronic laboratory notebooks aren't just for industry anymore. Many ELNs are priced for academia, "and rapidly it's coming to the point where science cannot be done without it," says Douglas Perry, dean of the college of informatics at Northern Kentucky University. Large companies typically use ELNs to standardize quality control or establish a legal data trail; academic labs use them to gain searchable access to years' worth of data or the ability to share data easily.

So, do you need an ELN? Ask yourself these four questions.

1. Do you generate high-throughput or automated data?
Ellen Quardokus, a research associate at Indiana University, uses Textco's Gene Inspector ELN to analyze and integrate genomics and proteomics data in a unified electronic format. "It had all of the things that I typically do to my sequence in one place," Quardokus says. Since sequences are linked to analyses, when she updates a sequence, results are adjusted accordingly.

Today even modest academic labs can generate massive amounts of information, thanks to sequencers, microarrays, and other genomics tools. An ELN can help organize, analyze, and archive these data.

2. Do you collaborate with other labs?
In the mid-1990s, says Jim Myers of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, "we started realizing that you could use [the Web] not only to get information but to put information out." With funding from the Department of Energy, Myers (then of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) and his colleagues designed a Web-based ELN (http://collaboratory.emsl.pnl.gov) that allows scientists to do science remotely through collaborations over the Internet.

Collaborating scientists can log in to their system remotely, and then download and upload text, images, and many other types of files, Myers says. Once a researcher submits data to the system, these data are sent out to the server and appear on an HTML page. The software can be configured with different workgroups and permission setups to accommodate collaborators.

3. Do you generate lots of visual data?
Microscopy and other modern techniques often produce large volumes of imaging data and related information, such as experimental details. The imaging core facility at Children's Hospital, Boston, uses Axiope's Catalyzer to track its data. According to former manager Matthew Salanga, being able to bring images straight from the microscope or other data-acquisition instruments into your ELN, where it can be annotated and analyzed, helps research progress efficiently, "because you take a level of error out of it."

4. Do you have high personnel turnover?
At the Structural Genomics Consortium in Oxford, UK, researchers archive and track their work using the ConturELN from Contur Technologies. Brian Marsden, principal investigator for research informatics at SGC-Oxford, says the ELN ensures that when people leave the lab, it retains access to their accumulated knowledge. "There are a number of cases where somebody has left, and we had to go back to look at the data generated previous to their leaving," Marsden says. "We can look at the ELN - the traces, the gels, the data - and pick up where they left off."