eLabFTW Austrian User Survey Report

This document is the summary report of the eLabFTW user survey administered by the Austrian ELN (electronic lab notebook) community. The aim of the survey was to gather insights in the needs of eLabFTW users and their opinion on potential new features both by quantitative means in closed questions as well as in open questions.

The questionnaire is based on several sources: Most importantly, we draw on an internal (and unpublished) survey at the Med Uni Graz with the goal to evaluate an ELN after a testing period. In more detail, we have used the obtained results to see which questionsworked well and merit some more investigation and which tools or features were frequently mentioned by respondents as useful for their research. The survey by the Med Uni Graz on a study by Dirnagl and Przesdzing 2016, hence, this was another source of the survey at hand. In addition, we included the experience from and user feedback gathered by research data management (RDM) staff and data stewards who support ELN users at their institutions.

The core of the questionnaire are ratings of several features that have previously been requested by users. Thereby, we hope to get systematic insights into our everyday experience with users and ultimately stir the development of eLabFTW. In addition, we have asked respondents at multiple occasions to describe use cases, potential improvements to eLabFTW or reasons why they do not use this ELN solution in open text questions. These responses allow us to get a better feeling on the details of the features in the questionnaire and also give ideas for further enhancements of eLabFTW.