Electronic Research Notebooks: Upcoming Training
Search ‘Library’ on PDMS to register.
Introduction to LabArchives Electronic Research Notebook Thursday 9th October 1-2pm
Introduction to Inventory Wednesday 29th October 11am-noon
Building Basics: Forms, Templates, & Widgets Thursday 29th January 2-3pm
Administrator Accounts Tuesday 17th March 2-3pm
LabArchives Research Bootcamp Eight workshops on different topics between 6-17 October
Did you know you can create electronic research notebooks (ERNs) at St Andrews to organise and collaborate on your work from a secure platform? Our institutional ERN provider is LabArchives. With the new academic year starting up, now is the perfect time to be thinking about staying organised in your research. In this post, we’ll explain a little more about what LabArchives is and what support is available, including upcoming training sessions at the University and through LabArchives.
What is an ERN?
An ERN is a digital platform designed to record, organise, and manage data and notes. It replaces other storage and organisational methods by pulling them into one place where they can be organised, worked on, and stored securely. Benefits of using an ERN can include:
- Accessibility: ERNs allow access from anywhere, on any device
- Collaboration: Teams can work together in real time
- Security: Data is encrypted and backed up on EU-based servers, reducing the risk of loss or unauthorised access
- Searchability: ERNs like LabArchives let you search across entries instantaneously
Anyone who wants to streamline research work, manage experiments, collaborate, or build a searchable portfolio of their work can use an ERN, whether students or staff. ERNs can also support good data practices that enhance reproducibility and transparency.
While ERNs are often associated with lab sciences, they’re incredibly useful for humanities research too. Maps, archaeological data, high-resolution images, and more can be annotated, tagged, shared, or records of provenance kept alongside textual analysis.
If you’re not sure where to begin, we offer the training sessions listed above to get you started!
What functional elements of LabArchives might be useful for my research?
Version control lets you (and any collaborators) track changes over time, so that you can revert to or reference earlier versions as needed. Multimedia support means you can embed images, videos, datasets, code, and more directly into entries. Our institutional ERN has forms, widgets, and templates which can be used to standardise and streamline your research processes. The integrations list continues to be added to and currently includes GraphPad Prism, SnapGene, Geneious, Jupyter, SciSpace, and others. Finally, we have access to technical support from LabArchives as part of our subscription. Each notebook works seamlessly up to around 1TB of volume, and users can create multiple notebooks if needed.
What are our users saying?
‘I’m a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biology, leading a team collecting behavioural data on bats. My team is one of several groups in our lab, which ranges from neurobiology to transgenics, and we all seamlessly store our lab notes on LabArchives. We really like the ease with which multiple users can access the same notebooks, with my team using several notebooks to store data based on projects instead of users. While we use folders within the notebooks to store some individual notes, the majority of our datasets are easily edited and added to by all users on the team. Additionally, being able to assign the ownership of the notebook to our supervisor means that notes will be retained and accessible as students and postdocs eventually move on from the lab! My lab manager and I attended a LabArchives Introduction course which was really helpful getting our LabArchives up and running!’ -Sasha Newar, School of Biology
‘I used LabArchives during my summer research project and found it invaluable. As someone with limited lab experience, keeping track of multiple protocols and experiments initially felt overwhelming. Recording my progress in LabArchives alongside a physical lab book helped me organise my work and better understand the science behind each procedure. Its accessibility was particularly useful when writing my final essay, as I could revisit the exact order of experiments from anywhere, not just in St Andrews. For anyone considering an electronic research notebook, LabArchives offers clarity, structure, and easy retrieval of information.’ -Orla Rostom, School of Medicine
Check out the FAQs on our ERN webpage, or get in touch to ask questions at [email protected].