2.1 – Creating A New Notebook and Uploading Sources Lesson

Lesson Overview

Starting strong with NotebookLM means understanding how to set up your notebooks and bring in the materials you want to work with. In this lesson, you’ll see how to create your own notebook from scratch and upload the right sources to power your research or project. This is a fundamental skill before engaging with AI summaries, insights, or any advanced actions in the tool.

By building your first notebook, you’re preparing a personal research space. You’ll be able to combine up to 50 files or links—including PDFs, text files, Google Docs, slide decks, YouTube videos, and more. Careful naming and organization matter because, over time, many users end up with untitled or poorly labeled notebooks that are hard to sort later. This lesson also covers how to manage the source panel, collapse or expand your list, and keep track of what each notebook contains.

Understanding limits on source sizes and file types helps prevent issues later, especially with large documents. If you often work across different media or want to combine several types of resources into one workspace, this method will be useful from day one. You’ll also see how NotebookLM makes it easy to return to and organize your notebooks so nothing gets lost as you move between projects.

Who This Is For

Whether you’re new to NotebookLM or just want a clean, effective way to organize your research, this lesson supports a range of users:

• Students looking to bring together study materials for research or projects
• Educators assembling course readings or reference resources
• Business analysts or team members organizing collaborative project documents
• Content creators or writers gathering inspiration and reference materials
• Anyone needing to manage diverse files or links in a single, accessible notebook

How This Fits in a Workflow

Creating and populating a notebook with sources is the first practical step before using any AI-powered features in NotebookLM. This is where you collect all your research materials—articles, notes, meeting transcripts, reports, or web pages—into one searchable location. For example, if you’re starting a market analysis report, you can gather competitor PDFs, relevant websites, and meeting notes as sources in a new notebook.

Once your sources are in place, you’ll be set up to use features like AI chat, summarization, or podcast-style overviews—built specifically around your uploaded materials. Returning to the homepage lets you quickly find, rename, or sort notebooks for efficient project management, whether you’re working solo or with a team.

Technical & Workflow Benefits

Previously, collecting resources for a project meant searching in folders, digging through emails, or bookmarking countless web links, often resulting in scattered or duplicated files. With NotebookLM, all sources for a project live in a single notebook, easily sortable and searchable.

This centralized approach saves time. Instead of switching between apps or tabs, you upload or link materials once and interact with them from the notebook interface. Good organization at this stage—naming notebooks and keeping file sizes manageable—also helps AI functions return better, faster results in later steps.

For anyone managing research or content regularly, this method reduces confusion and clutter, lets you view or collapse source panels as needed, and allows easy renaming, deletion, and sharing. With support for multiple formats and simple drag-and-drop or linking, your collection process becomes much more streamlined and less error-prone.

Practice Exercise

Try setting up a notebook for a current project or topic you’re working on:

1. Create a new notebook in NotebookLM and give it a meaningful name (e.g., “Spring Marketing Campaign” or “Shakespeare Research”).
2. Add two or three sources: upload a PDF (such as a report or whitepaper), attach a Google Doc, and add a web link or YouTube video relevant to your project.
3. Return to the homepage and review your notebooks. Rename any untitled entries and try collapsing and expanding the sources panel.

Did keeping everything in one place help you feel more organized? How would maintaining multiple focused notebooks (rather than one huge one) change your workflow?

Course Context Recap

This lesson lays the foundation for everything you’ll do later in NotebookLM. After learning to set up and stock a notebook with sources, you’ll be ready to use AI features like summarization, insight extraction, and custom notes. Earlier, you learned about the interface and core features, while the next lesson will guide you through summarizing your documents for faster understanding. Explore the full course to keep building your skills and get the most out of Google NotebookLM.