An Easily Installable Demo

The Flexibility of a Drupal Approach

The overall approach is based on the use of custom content types, which allow us to attach fields as needed to the standard Drupal content type of a node. In this case, we only need two custom content types – the Experiment and the Protocol Step. The Experiment stores the information pertaining to a given experiment as a whole. The Experiment then usually references one or more Protocol Steps. Each Protocol Step then contains the appropriate sets of data fields where the researcher can store the data for the procedure that they are performing. The sets of data fields are then displayed using separate tabs for the given Protocol Step.

By using appropriate Drupal modules, we are able to accommodate numerous different types of data fields, including the following.

• Task List – Customizable list of tasks to be done in any Protocol Step
• Rich Text Fields – Using HTML formatting tags for variations in styled text
• Data Tables – Configurable HTML tables to store and display data
• Geolocation Data – Can be shown on a Google map or other maps with appropriate freely available keys. This can be used in conjunction with the Address fields for automatic lookup of coordinates
• Image and File Uploads – You can designate what file extensions are allowable for upload (e.g., xlsx, docx, pdf, png, jpg)
• URLs – you can record one URL or a list of URLs with website names that may be relevant to the protocol step
• Tables of Specific Value Types – If you wish to capture a group of a given data type, then there are tabs that contain given types of data along with an associated label for each data item. The types of data that are available using this approach include integers, decimal values, floating point values, plain text values and date values.
• Videos – Videos can either be uploaded to your server and displayed or they can be displayed from YouTube.

Easy Installation from a Repository

This is the first demo version of this approach where we have released the full source code on our GitHub repository. This repository is set up to allow you to easily install your own version of a Drupal based ELN. This uses an approach that is similar to the approach that many Drupal theme developers use to deliver an installable version of Drupal that uses their theme along with demo content. The installation steps are shown on the home README.md file of the GitHub repository.

Continued Improvements

It is our hope that this initial version can be useful for many situations where someone may want to use this freely available ELN approach for their research. With the flexibility of having access to multiple different data types, a fairly easy installation and thousands of additional freely available Drupal modules, there are a great many possibilities for customizing this ELN to a researcher’s needs without too much time or effort involved. With continued input and feedback and the resulting continued refinements, perhaps this approach can result in lower costs and improved functionality for researchers as they continue to bring about appropriate scientific and other research advancements.