What is an Electronic Lab Notebook?

An Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) is a digital notebook and workspace for better data management, connectivity, collaboration, and sharing resources. LabArchives ELN for Research is flexible and can be accessed anywhere you have an internet connection. Everything that is uploaded or entered into LabArchives is searchable, time- and date-stamped, and versioned, making it easy to keep track of all of your research data.

LabArchives Features

Notebook

• Versatile, easy-to-use interface
• Mobile and tablet browser compatible
• Record notes, create tables, add hyperlinks, edit html, and embed media
• Create and edit Microsoft Office docs within ELN
• Store any file type
• Create custom forms, calculators, and tools or utilize dozens of premade scientific widgets
• Integrations with popular scientific software including SnapGene, GraphPad Prism, and REDCap
• Image annotation
• Chemical sketching
• Equations
• PubMed reference list

Collaboration

• Real-time alerts of all research activities via Activity Feed
• Work on notebook pages simultaneously
• Comments and tag users on any entry
• Signing and witnessing workflows
• Hierarchical user roles & permissions
• Invite collaborators to notebooks, folders, pages, or entries
• Monitoring and reporting tools for notebook activities
• Easy sharing and publishing
• Standardize research processes across teams

Data Management

• Consolidate research documentation and data
• Create library of custom tags for use across notebook users
• Add links to other notebook pages or entries, local file paths, or external websites
• Annotate files and published entries with custom metadata
• Automate file uploads from local folders via LabArchives Folder Monitor
• Sync entries with LabArchives Inventory to connect item usage with research data

Security

• Industry leading data security and encryption
• Consistent data availability with automatic backups
• Secure notebook ownership transfer
• Complete revision history with immutable time stamps
• Meets compliance standards for SOC2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, and other regulatory requirements

Access to LabArchives

UT Southwestern uses Southwestern IDs to access LabArchives ELN Accounts.

LabArchives support can be reached via Email, online chat, and also through the LabArchives online Help section under the Support tab.

If you have any questions or issues with your Southwestern ID, please contact the UT Southwestern Service Desk 214-648-7600.

Notebook Setup for PIs

Set yourself up first

If you are the lab PI, you should set up all of your notebooks and folders for your lab and then share your notebooks with your researchers. For guidance on how you might set up your notebook structure, please refer to the Tips for Setting up your Team Notebooks.

The PI is the owner, in a typical lab set-up, and creates his/her account as the starting point. Next, the PI should create the appropriate number of notebooks based on the response given to #4.

If the Administrators will be doing this step (#2), the PI only needs to add the Admins to the first notebook. The Admins will then be enabled to create new notebooks and add all the lab personnel.

Note that a selection between two choices will be presented when an Admin starts to create a new notebook: 1) is the account owned by the PI; or, 2) is it their own personal notebook? They should always choose the option for the Account owned by the PI to allow for data sharing. The users can be added to the appropriate notebooks after the notebooks are created.

An optional step in the process is to create a standard structure for the notebooks and copy this structure to each notebook prior to adding any users. You can begin to add the users to each notebook and set the role, rights, and group status in each notebook.

Groups is an important management tool which enables rights/permissions to be set simultaneously for all members at a grouped unit level; instead of managing roles/permissions of each member individually.