Using templates in the CDD Vault Electronic Lab Notebook offers numerous benefits that streamline research workflows and enhance data management. Templates provide a standardized structure for capturing experimental details- ensuring consistency and completeness across various studies. Additionally, templates allow for faster experiment setup by eliminating repetitive formatting tasks, ultimately improving productivity. By promoting uniform data recording, templates also enhance data retrieval and analysis, making it easier to compare results and draw meaningful insights.
To create an ELN template, a vault administrator may create a new ELN entry where they can create an outline of the entry structure with prompts for the user to include specific information or format data in a certain way. Additionally, for each template created, vault administrators may choose a certain subset of ELN fields to include in that template. This is especially useful as administrators may create templates for various experiment types such as chemical synthesis and biological experiments which need different metadata fields to capture relevant information to that research objective.
- Create a new ELN entry
- Select the “create a template button” at the top right corner of the screen.
- In the next popup window, assign this template a name and select the group of ELN fields relevant to that experiment type. Notice in this example, “cell line” is not selected for this chemical synthesis template as it is not relevant. This feature ensures strong data integrity and searchability when entries are created from templates.
At this stage, vault administrators are able to publish the template to all other users within the vault. To access a template when creating a new entry, users may select the appropriate template from the dropdown menu in the create a new ELN entry process.
Pro tip: To view all of the templates within a vault, simply conduct a search using the status filter and select has -> template. This search will pull back all available templates within a vault.
In order to edit a previously saved template, open that entry, select the reopen template button, make the relevant changes, and publish that template again according to the above steps.
