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Tags let you label artifacts and collections with terms that make sense to you — sample type, experiment phase, priority, reagent, whatever fits your workflow. Am artifact can have multiple tags, and tags work across collections.

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Adding tags

  1. Open an artifact or collection.
  2. Click Add tag… below the toolbar.
  3. Type to search existing tags or create a new one.
  4. Press Enter or click the tag to add it.
You can also select from your recent tags — Bower remembers what you’ve used before and shows the most common ones first.

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Creating new tags

Type any name into the tag input. If it doesn’t exist yet, you’ll see a Create option at the bottom. Click it to create and apply the tag in one step. All tags are custom — there are no pre-defined categories. Use whatever terminology makes sense for your lab.

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Removing tags

Hover over a tag and click the x to remove it from that note or collection. Removing a tag from one item doesn’t affect other items with the same tag.

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Where tags appear

Tags are visible on notes and collections in the detail view, below the toolbar. When you have many tags, Bower shows the first few with a “+N more” button to expand. Tags are also tracked in audit logs — you can see when tags were added or removed.

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Tips for using tags effectively

  • Be consistent — pick a convention and stick with it. “pH-test” and “pH test” are different tags.
  • Use tags for cross-cutting concerns — things that span multiple collections. For example, tag all notes related to a specific reagent regardless of which experiment they belong to.
  • Combine with search — tags are indexed, so you can search for tagged notes using Bird or the search bar.