The ALICE Electronic Logbook

All major experiments need tools that provide a way to keep a record of the events and activities, during both commissioning and operations. In ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) at CERN, this task is performed by the ALICE Electronic Logbook (eLogbook), a custom-made application developed and maintained by the Data-Acquisition team (DAQ), the group which within the collaboration has the responsibility for Data Acquisition. Started as a statistics repository, the eLogbook has evolved to become not only a fully functional electronic logbook, but also a massive information repository used to store the conditions and statistics of the several online systems. It is currently used by more than 1000 users in 50 different countries and it plays an important role in the daily ALICE collaboration activities. This paper will describe the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) based architecture of the eLogbook, the database schema and the relevance of the information stored in the eLogbook to the different ALICE actors, not only for near real time procedures but also for long term analysis. It will also present the web interface, including the different used technologies, the implemented security measures and the current main features. Finally it will present the roadmap for the future, including both technical and functional developments.