Digital Notebooks are an extension of the traditional bound and numbered lab notebook. Being electronic confers additional features into the notebook such as search capabilities, collaboration, and auditing and version history from funding agency compliance. Additionally, electronic documents, such as spreadsheets, images, and data files can be added to a Digital Notebook. Digital Notebooks are centrally maintained and can be accessed remotely by one or more people.

Anyone with a Tufts account who uses notebooks to record their work can use Digital Notebooks. In fact, many research groups and activities from art history and humanities, engineering projects, to Core facilities are welcomed to use LabArchives in an effort to introduce research data management principles. Our consultants can help you to decide on what project work-flows and functionality best aligns with the solution.

If you use Digital Notebooks, you can:

• Manage and collect data from multiple data streams including instrument, processed data, metadata (“Data about Data”) and notes.
• Provide a complete and lasting record of discovery.
• Deliver local/remote easy, safe and secure access to data
• Reduce loss of lab expertise when students and staff leave by providing a repository of information for others to access.
• Through-document search function supports multiple formats including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF.
• Create forums to collaborate, query, comment, re-think, and interpret results.
• Meet NIH and NSF research data management plan requirements and provide public sharing of information
• Protect Intellectual Property (IP) including know-how and new technology

Digital Notebooks are not a substitute for Box, etc. Digital Notebooks have more enhanced capabilities for organizing your research notes, protocols, and outputs.

Please have each member of your research team complete the LOGIN access to LabArchives request form. Access will be granted with 24 hours of submitting the form.

For general support issues (i.e. browser issues, etc) contact the TTS 24/7 Service Desk at 617-627-3376 or send an email to it@tufts.edu.

Generally most data generated on a desktop can be stored directly in the Digital Notebook. For LabArchives, the limit is 15GB per file upload.

LabArchives stores your notebook activity in the cloud. This storage is redundant and secure on the vendor’s storage infrastructure.

No. These products are not designed for such compliance and do not satisfy the requirements for data coming under these regulations.

Yes. These products are designed with features which allow collaboration.

Digital Notebooks require network connectivity. In cases where you have no access to the internet, such as being in the field, we recommend recording your work locally and then transferring/copying information into the Digital Notebooks when you re-establish network connectivity.

LabArchives runs a virus scan on all uploaded files and prohibits upload of any files that fail the scan as well as executable code.