I must say, it is such a pleasure to come across tools that are nothing short of gorgeous.  And by “gorgeous” I of course mean: easy to use, functional, clean, and extraordinarily useful.

I just so happened to stumble across one of these recently and decided I needed to take a break from studying for mid-terms to tell you about it quickly.

Spring Protocols, brought to you by the folks over at Springer Publishing, allows users to search for, manage, and submit protocols in such a beautifully simple way that you begin to wonder how you possibly carried out your experiments without it.

As you can see from the image, the homepage is super-clean and straight-forward with nearly all of the emphasis being placed on the search bar in the middle of the screen.  However, instead of going totally “Googley” on us, they chose to also incorporate some teasers on the left and right-hand sides of the screen to show what we can get upon registering.

Individual registration is a snap.  Just pick a username, type-in your email address, password and name, and you’re in!  (Why don’t all sites make registering this easy?)  Though I kind of wish they allowed users to sign in using OpenID, the registration was so painless that I’ll avoid complaining…

Once you make your account, you can see some of things you can do as a registered user, most of which are alluded to in the home screen.  I’m not going to go too into detail on these (given that my EMag exam tomorrow is not-so-quietly harkening me back to study for it), so feel free to explore them for yourself.

Typing in a quick search for “pcr” yielded 6,261 results.

However, trying to click on one of these promptly reminded me that I should stop studying at my apartment and instead move over to the library so I can access it on WashU’s network…   Nevertheless, this illustrated a pretty solid point: in the search results page, there is a key for “Free  |  Subscribed  |  Trial” protocols, but none of the protocols are actually labelled as such.  A quick addition of the icons to the search results would really aid in the search process when a user isn’t on a registered network.

Nevertheless, a bit of browsing sent me to a protocol page, which I could access and I was most definitely impressed by what I saw.  I loved the ability to view the abstract, full text, or download the protocol to your computer.  However, the coolest feature is the ability to save the protocol to your “My Protocols” list via the folder button next to the printer.  Also, the table of contents in the top left proved particularly useful when trying to pinpoint the materials I was looking for.

Furthermore, the “Useful Tools” columns on the left, truly are useful, which is an added plus!  (*Surprisingly, most sites I look at advertising “Useful Tools” are actually the exact opposite…)

One of the things I was most impressed with was the number of protocols in each subject area (as indicated by the persistent “Browse by Subject” column on the left).  This is a tremendous amount of core content that really makes the site useful and serves as a backbone for catalyzing user-generated submission.

All in all, I really love the site (in case you haven’t been able to pick up on that by now).  In fact, the only “real” problem I can see is the general lack of video content, which is only really a problem because they advertise pretty heavily via the left-side navigation panel.

More thorough integration into JoVE (which is where the videos are being pulled from now) would really benefit the content base.

Alright, time for me to get back to studying.  If anyone gets a chance to use the site, or other sites like it, please share your thoughts!  I’d love to hear about your experiences with it!