To sign in to LabArchives, simply go to labarchives.com, select Sign In, and then select Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN).

Do NOT use the standard email login option. Instead select University of Utah from the Sign in through your institution selector. After this, you will be prompted to login using the standard University CAS system.

Note: If you are on campus or using the campus VPN, this screen will look different, and it will simply prompt you to login with university credentials.

There are a few ways to create a new notebook in LabArchives, but for this quick tutorial, select the three dots on the top right, and then select Utilities and Create new Notebook…

From here, you can give your notebook a name and optional starting layout. Lab and Classroom are demo layouts provided by LabArchives, but you can also use a previous notebook you've created in order to pre-populate your new notebook with the same folder structure.

In order to update the settings on a notebook, select the three dots on the top right, and then select Notebook Settings.

From the Notebook Settings page, you can adjust basic properties of your notebook including commenting, look-and-feel, and signing policies.

Notes:

• Markdown usage is beyond the scope of this tour, but can be very useful. A good overview is available at daringfireball.net.
• Further details on page signing are available via the LabArchives Knowledge Base.

From the User Management page, you can add collaborators, assign roles, adjust group membership settings, and assign signing privileges.

You can add a collaborator to your notebook by selecting New User and entering their University email address.

Note: Further details on user roles are available via the LabArchives Knowledge Base.

From the Group Management page, you can add user groups for your notebook. This will allow you to organize multiple users' permissions rather than managing them individually.

Note: Further details on group management are available via the LabArchives Knowledge Base.

In order to get an overview of your notebooks, select the three dots on the top right, and then select Utilities and Notebook Manager

From here you can see which notebooks you are associated with (Notebook), your relationship to a notebook (Your Role), the total amount of updates that have been made to a notebook (Activities), and when a notebook was last updated (Last Activity). In addition you have the option to add or remove notebooks from the notebook navigator (shown in the screenshot below at the top left, as Notebooks 7) and perform a few actions on the notebook such as notebook duplication.

There are many ways to share and collaborate on a notebook, and you can control the scope of sharing from sharing an entire notebook to giving access to a specific entry on a page.

The three main ways to share content are:

• Clicking on the tools icon at the top right hand side of a page
• Right-clicking on a notebook item on the left (i.e. the notebook, a folder, or a page) and choosing Share...
• Clicking on the share icon at the top of a page entry

From the Share window Invite People tab, you can invite new collaborators and give them either edit or view access to the notebook component you are choosing to share.

From the Groups or People With Access tab, you can then view your share settings and make adjustments.

The last two tabs on this page, URL to share and Publish Data, give you options to quickly share content with a URL link and publicly share your data.

At the top of each LabArchives page, there are options for adding entries. The New option will list all available entry types, and next to this, LabArchives gives quick entry options for the three most heavily used entry types: Rich Text, Attachment, and Office Document.

Rich Text

A simplified Word-like entry.

Attachment

Can be any file from your computer, but view options will vary depending on LabArchives' support. (NOTE: Attachments can also be added by dragging and dropping a file from your computer into the LabArchives' window)

Office Document

LabArchives has support for MSOffice Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. These files can be edited and saved within the LabArchives system.

There are, however, many other entry types provided by LabArchives.

When adding entries from the upper menu, entries will typically appear at the top of the page, and if you would like to reposition them, you would hover your mouse over the entry and use up and down arrows to move the entry around the page. However, entries can also be inserted directly in a predetermined position by mousing between entries and selecting Insert from here.

Once added, entries can be edited (if possible within LabArchives) by clicking on the body of the content or clicking on the pencil icon.

Every change that occurs in LabArchives is stored and version controlled, so nothing in the system is ever truly lost.

In order to view change information and/or revert back to a previous version of a page or entry, simply click on either the tool icon at the top of the page or the ellipsis at the top of an entry and select View revisions.

From this view, you can see a variety of information about changes and revert back to previous versions of the entry or page.

Tags are used in LabArchives in order to help find things while searching.

In order to add and change tags, simply click on the ellipsis above an entry, and select Tags...

From here you can add tags to an entry.

To search for content, you can use the Search notebook field to do a simple search within your current notebook or click on the downward facing triangle to the right of this field for advanced search options.

(Note the Tags option within advanced search which can help you drill down for data using your tags.)