Register Here for a LabArchives@Brown Electronic Lab Notebook account
LabArchives@Brown is a cloud-based electronic lab notebook maintained by LabArchives that can be used by researchers, instructors, and students for input and organization of laboratory data, information sharing, and collaboration. It is appropriate for use in a wide variety of laboratories, including biological sciences, chemistry and physical sciences and engineering. For assistance with help setting up and/or using LabArchives@Brown classroom edition or for research contact labarchives@brown.edu.
LabArchives at Brown provides unlimited storage space. The current size limit per file is 4GB. Users are responsible for ensuring use complies with University's data handling and sharing policies.
LabArchives Brown University Edition serves as a more formal record of research in order to serve as a record of the origin and development of intellectual property (IP) and help in the prevention of research misconduct. This tutorial is for the LabArchives Research Edition. Brown also subscribes to LabArchives Classroom Edition - for assistance using Classroom edition please contact labarchives@brown.edu.
1) Faculty members serving as the Primary Investigator (PI) of a lab or project can visit LabArchives@Brown and set up a notebook for each student and then invite the student to their notebook that you own. After creating the notebook:
- Click on the ellipsis ⋮ icon in the upper right hand corner of the notebook
- Click on Notebook Settings. Under User Management you can invite a student to the notebook that you created for them by entering their name and email address and they will receive an invitation to create an account.
- Next to their name click on Role to select their permissions. You have the Owner Role because you created the notebook. You can assign students with the User Role, which will allow them to access and create entries in the notebook. The User Role cannot share an entry, page or folder or the entire notebook, e.g., with other students working on the project; if you need them to be able to share then you will have to set up sharing in advance or you can make them Administrator Role of the notebook, which will then allow them the ability to share.
Being the owner of all notebooks preserves your access to students’ notebooks; you can view and monitor all entries and search across notebooks and change or revoke access and permissions as needed. Owning all project notebooks also ensures that you and the University never lose access to a project’s data. PIs can provide students with a copy of their notebooks for projects they worked on when they leave Brown.
2) Also in Notebook Settings you can click on the radial to enable page signing if you require that any lab member has to have you review and sign off on any of their entries and results (and also require Signing with Witness, if preferred). Once you sign a page it can no longer be edited, to prevent any fraudulent changes afterward.
3) LabArchives notebooks have advanced version control that can help prevent research misconduct.
- No entries can ever be deleted. Even though an entry, page, folder or even notebook can be added to the Trash and removed from your Notebook Navigator, the files are never deleted from the server
- Owners of a notebook can track who made changes to a notebook, what changes were made, and when they were made. It also allows for an owner to override and revert to an earlier version of an entry, if needed.
