The e-nnovate interface allows you to perform searches of your information, by topics, dates, key words and a variety of other items and combinations.

Even after many years have passed, you can find old results in a few seconds.

Perhaps even more importantly, so can your collaborators or those who later on take on your projects.

E-nnovate e-notebook can search in different file formats like PDF, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. The system creates an index of all your notes allowing you to get results just in a heart beat.

Illustrative Case #1: Locating an observation

In a discussion with a senior researcher, Andrew who is a lab-tech in charge of histology is told about a situation in which their particular tissue prep may display more blood vessels on one side of the prep than the other. Andrew remembers that he had once seen a preparation like this and had made a note about it. Instead of having to read through the hundreds of preps he had made, photographed and described over the past year, Andrew simply searches his e-nnovate entries.

He narrows the search by using the "Histology Prep Descriptions" topic and uses the keyword "capillaries" to find the four entries where he makes specific comments on the capillary counts. It is then very easy to find the entry where he has made this observation. He is able to quickly return and show the senior researcher the observation which then is used to initiate a new set of experiments.

Illustrative Case #2: Locating an observation, take two

Sven was a visiting German postdoc who had arrived recently to the Chen lab. Right from the get go, It was clear that he had a peculiar way of organizing his information. He did not want to store his notes in a chronological manner like the rest of the lab did, but rather preferred to categorize his notes based on the complex relationship between his experiments and what his main project was back home.

Six month later, having finished his grant money, Sven bid farewell to the lab and returned to Germany. At the end of his tenure, he made a presentation to the lab that made everyone realize that some of the data that he had taken would be tremendously useful to the laboratory.

The lab manager was now given the task of finding the experiments and observations that were of interest to the lab. He knew that Sven, as a professional courtesy had labeled the data sets in English, as well as the conditions of each experiments. Convinced that Sven had taken his lab notebook with him back to Germany, the lab manager e-mailed him asking him to send him a copy of the lab notebook and a list of the experiments he had performed so that he can fish for interesting information.

To his surprise all he received was instructions on how to access all of Sven's work on the Internet. After a few minutes, he was able to search Sven's lab notebook and look for particular experiments that might be of interest to his laboratory. He even made some comments on some of the experiments that may be performed as follow up.