Standardizing Metadata for Electronic Laboratory Notebook objects: A Call for Community Collaboration

Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELNs) have become essential and often institutionally required tools for modern scientific research, generating large amounts of digital objects including documents, notebooks, folders, projects, etc. These objects are crucial for recording the research process and provide unique context for research results and downstream research data. However, the lack of standardized metadata schemas for these digital artifacts limits their discoverability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability. While physical samples benefit from established schemas like IGSN, ELN objects lack equivalent standardization.
This presentation introduces our ongoing work with DataCite to use and potentially extend their metadata schema to effectively describe ELN digital objects, exemplified by RSpace. We will demonstrate how our current approach maps ELN-specific attributes to the DataCite metadata schema, addressing unique challenges such as versioning, permissions, and relationships between digital lab objects.
We will present preliminary mappings between RSpace ELN objects and DataCite schema elements, highlighting gaps where extensions or modifications may be necessary. Critically, we recognize that establishing widely applicable standards requires perspectives from the wider research community. Therefore, we invite collaboration from ELN users, developers, and metadata specialists to contribute to refining these mappings.