Supporting Research and Researchers through the deployment of Digital Notebooks: A framework for implementation and impact

This poster was presented at the University of Manchester Open Research Conference, 9-10 June 2025.

Impactful research and development requires robust data management, and many research institutions provide infrastructure for data capture, processing, storage and sharing. The sharing aspect can contribute to University commitments to openness and transparency of research processes. However, approaches for capturing everyday research processes are often left to individual researchers or groups, leaving research records fragmented across physical notebooks and diverse digital systems. To address these issues, many research organisations are looking to implement Electronic Research Notebooks (ERNs). Our research, based on case studies in the University of Manchester Research Lifecycle Programme and the Cancer Research UK Manchester, aims to identify specific, actionable barriers to implementation of these notebooks, test the efficacy of interventions at an individual, technical and institutional level and identify ways to implement ERNs. We will discuss early findings from this study, as well as our plans for an Implementation Report from which other higher education institutions and research organisations would be able to extract learnings to support their own implementation and deployment processes. This will include quantitative (costs, timings, user interactions) and qualitative (surveys, interviews, co-creation workshops and community events) evidence, shared in an open and transparent way, to understand and overcome these barriers.