The Kiel Data Management (KDM) Infrastructure places data capturing straight in the data creation process. With this approach student education courses can be just another use case of data capturing. Smoothing this process and usage of available technologies inspired the KDM Team to prototype with " Smart Pen " and digital Ink. This technology with handwriting recognition fi lls the gap between the very long-lasting paper protocols and their manual digitalization of fi eld and sampling data. The combination of the KDM Infrastructure with the digital Ink technology enables data capturing from student education throughout high-end scientifi c lab work. The realization of persistent information started approx. 37000 years ago in the days of cave paintings (Fig. 1). In the following history stone tablets (eg. sPad) were used to record information fi rst and then a steady development of persistent information from " paper and ink feather " , " paper and printing techniques " to " computer-based information recording " happened. Until " computer-based information recording " , the paper-based recording was the choice throughout the last centuries. In many scientifi c disciplines paper-based recording remained the only option over the last decades. These data and informations need to be converted to a digital representation for further " computer-based " use. After these manual and error-prone transformations the information can be analyzed and interpreted in the context of scientifi c research .