The Electronic Research Notebook Service (ERNS) is a partnership among Northwestern IT, IT units from some Northwestern Schools and Colleges, and LabArchives staff that provides technology and support for storing research notes, protocols, small datasets, and research results in one place. Northwestern has a site license for the LabArchives Electronic Lab Notebook for Research, a versatile, user friendly platform for creating a permanent record of your research process, including a complete version history. This site license allows anyone with an active Northwestern NetID to log in and benefits from enterprise features including unlimited notebooks, larger individual file size limits and user support from LabArchives. LabArchives is offered at no cost to Northwestern researchers.
Despite the name LabArchives, the platform can be used to manage research methods, documentation and results from all types of research. LabArchives provides serveral use cases which describe how the ERNS can be used by different units or disciplines.
To start using the ERNS, go to the LabArchives login page:
https://mynotebook.labarchives.com/login
and enter your Northwestern email address.
You will be taken to the Northwestern secure sign in page. After you've signed in, you'll be taken directly to your LabArchives personal workspace.
LabArchives has a useful "quick start" guide, which will guide you through creation of your ERNS workspace. It also has instructions on how to link any of your previous LabArchives accounts not made with your Northwestern email address.
Once you've logged into LabArchives, you should see a notebook named "Northwestern's Electronic Research Notebook Service" in the left side menu. This notebook is a helpful guide created by Tobin Magle, Lead Data Management Specialist at NUIT's Research Computing and Data Services unit. The content in this guide is from that notebook. Thank you, Tobin!
To start a new notebook, click on "Notebooks" then on the "+", then fill in the fields in the main part of the page.