Electronic Laboratory Notebook
OLF comes with an electronic laboratory notebook(ELN) and allows researchers to document their experiments and related work electronically. In the top menu just below the OLF logo one can select "Notes" which contains actions for the ELN.
##Create note
To create a note, select "Notes" in the menu and select "Create new note" from the dropdown menu. This redirects to another page where one should state the title and content for this note.
The content for the note is written in the rich text field just below the title. The text field provides a Microsoft Word-like text editor where you can define font size, listings, tables and much more.
To actually create the note, click on the "Create" button just below the text field.
This will redirect the user to the "Show" page for this note which is described in the following section.
##Show note
To show a note one can select a note from the different note listings in the "Notes" menu(the last 4 items in the dropdown). The show note is also the page redirected to after creation of a note.
From the list, click "show" on the note to show. On the "show" page one can choose to edit, sign, delete, share and much more which is descriped in the following sections.
##Edit note From the "Show note" page click on the button labeled "Edit" to edit a page. This redirects to a page just like the "Create note" page but with values in title and content. To store potential changes click the "Update" button below the text field to update the note with the new changes.
##Copying from Word Documents
The ELN is able to keep format when copying content from word. Mark the content from the Word document and copy it to the clipboard, either by hitting ctrl+c or right-clicking and choose copy.
Paste it anywhere in the content of a note by hitting ctrl+v or right-clicking and choose paste.
##Insert images
The ELN allows insertion of images copied to the clipboard. Among others one can copy images to the clipboard from a browser or Word:
Paste it into the ELN just as in the above section.
##Sign note (author)
One of the key features of the ELN is the ability for users to sign notes when the note is finished.
To sign a note, go to the "show" page for the note which should be signed. Click on finalize to sign the note.
If this is the first time the user tries to sign a note, the user will be redirected to a page for generating keys which is used to secure the signing of a note. For security reasons, the user is prompted to enter the users password to generate the keys.
After the key generation or if keys are generated previously the user is directed to a page for signing the note. Here the password needs to be confirmed and a user is choosen as supervisor for this note.
When signing the note by clicking "Sign note" the user is redirected to the "show" page and the note is locked from editing, deletion and signing.
Each time one goes to the "show" page for a signed note the signatures for the note is validated. It will show a green check icon if the signature is valid and a red cross icon if the signature is invalid. The supervisor signature will also show a red cross if the supervisor hasn't signed the note yet.