Effectiveness of tagging laboratory data using Dublin Core in an electronic scientific notebook

As a form of grey literature, scientific laboratory notebooks are intended to meet two broad functions: to record daily in-house activities as well as to manage research results. A major goal of this scientific electronic notebook project is to provide high quality resource discovery and retrieval capabilities for primary data objects produced in a multidisciplinary, biotechnology research laboratory study. This paper discusses a prototype modified relational database that incorporates Dublin Core metadata to organize and describe the laboratory data early in the scientific process. The study investigates the effectiveness of this approach to support daily in-house tasks as well as to capture, integrate, and exchange research results.