Creating Context for the Experiment Record. User-Defined Metadata: Investigations into Metadata Usage in the LabTrove ELN

The
drive toward more transparency in research, the growing willingness
to make data openly available, and the reuse of data to maximize the
return on research investment all increase the importance of being
able to find information and make links to the underlying data. The
use of metadata in Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELNs) to curate
experiment data is an essential ingredient for facilitating discovery.
The University of Southampton has developed a Web browser-based ELN
that enables users to add their own metadata to notebook entries.
A survey of these notebooks was completed to assess user behavior
and patterns of metadata usage within ELNs, while user perceptions
and expectations were gathered through interviews and user-testing
activities within the community. The findings indicate that while
some groups are comfortable with metadata and are able to design a
metadata structure that works effectively, many users are making little
attempts to use it, thereby endangering their ability to recover data
in the future. A survey of patterns of metadata use in these notebooks,
together with feedback from the user community, indicated that while
a few groups are comfortable with metadata and are able to design
a metadata structure that works effectively, many users adopt a “minimum
required” approach to metadata. To investigate whether the
patterns of metadata use in LabTrove were unusual, a series of surveys
were undertaken to investigate metadata usage in a variety of platforms
supporting user-defined metadata. These surveys also provided the
opportunity to investigate whether interface designs in these other
environments might inform strategies for encouraging metadata creation
and more effective use of metadata in LabTrove.