lab notebooks -- state of the craft
Apr. 20th, 2006 09:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adrian_turtleI have been keeping lab notebooks for 20 years. I figure the overlaps (where I was keeping more than one notebook at a time) make up for the interruptions. Sometimes I did it for a class or an employer, and was constrained by their format requirements. I've never kept a perfect notebook, though some years have been a lot further from perfect than others. It's remarkable - so many people keep lab notebooks, and have been doing it for so long, I would expect us to have evolved some kind of optimal way of doing this. And we have evolved a reasonably *consistent* way of doing it, but it's really a pain in the ass.
I just started using a different blank notebook for my lab notebook. Lab notebooks have a particular look and feel -- if you use them, you know what it is. The pages are mostly graph paper, with detailed indexing information at the top of every page. (Not just a project name, but titles and subtitles.) There are reference numbers every 5 lines so you can cite part of a page. At the bottom of the page, there's a space to sign and date, and another space for a witness to sign and date. And a preprinted reminder that the whole thing is proprietary information. (This wonderful notebook is not suitable for private or academic use, more's the pity.) The center margin is wider than usual, and it opens quite flat so it's easy to write on even the early pages. Even if a person only has one hand available. The cover extends a bit further than usual, and is very rigid -- it supports the book well enough to write on it.
But those are matters of construction, and probably more related to paper being cheap (or lab notebooks being expensive) than to any particular insight about how lab notebooks are used. What inspired me to post was the Table of Contents. Every blank lab notebook I've ever used has a table of contents. Sometimes the notebook comes with "Table of Contents" preprinted on some blank pages at the front, to remind the user to make one as he or she goes. Sometimes I write "Table of Contents" on the first page to remind myself. And put [experiment 1] pages 3-8 on one line. Then maybe a few months later I'll come back and put [other experiment 2] pages 9-20 on another line. And I'll fret about whether the discussion on 21-24 really properly counts as a separate experiment, and give the thing up as a bad business. Grepping dead goats is hard.
The Table of Contents for my wonderful new lab notebook shows a page number, and a big blank space for the subject, and a smaller blank space for the date, for every page in the notebook. Every page gets a subject heading as I fill it in. I've skimmed page headings of notebooks (and you know lab notebooks are not little flippable pages like mass-market paperbacks) looking for something in my old work, or the old work of someone else. This kind of table of contents is MUCH better for that kind of searching. It may even be better than thematic chapter/project titles. 20 years of my own lab notebooks. Hundreds of other people's notebooks. Yet this idea, which could have been invented 200 years ago, comes as a revelation to me.
I just started using a different blank notebook for my lab notebook. Lab notebooks have a particular look and feel -- if you use them, you know what it is. The pages are mostly graph paper, with detailed indexing information at the top of every page. (Not just a project name, but titles and subtitles.) There are reference numbers every 5 lines so you can cite part of a page. At the bottom of the page, there's a space to sign and date, and another space for a witness to sign and date. And a preprinted reminder that the whole thing is proprietary information. (This wonderful notebook is not suitable for private or academic use, more's the pity.) The center margin is wider than usual, and it opens quite flat so it's easy to write on even the early pages. Even if a person only has one hand available. The cover extends a bit further than usual, and is very rigid -- it supports the book well enough to write on it.
But those are matters of construction, and probably more related to paper being cheap (or lab notebooks being expensive) than to any particular insight about how lab notebooks are used. What inspired me to post was the Table of Contents. Every blank lab notebook I've ever used has a table of contents. Sometimes the notebook comes with "Table of Contents" preprinted on some blank pages at the front, to remind the user to make one as he or she goes. Sometimes I write "Table of Contents" on the first page to remind myself. And put [experiment 1] pages 3-8 on one line. Then maybe a few months later I'll come back and put [other experiment 2] pages 9-20 on another line. And I'll fret about whether the discussion on 21-24 really properly counts as a separate experiment, and give the thing up as a bad business. Grepping dead goats is hard.
The Table of Contents for my wonderful new lab notebook shows a page number, and a big blank space for the subject, and a smaller blank space for the date, for every page in the notebook. Every page gets a subject heading as I fill it in. I've skimmed page headings of notebooks (and you know lab notebooks are not little flippable pages like mass-market paperbacks) looking for something in my old work, or the old work of someone else. This kind of table of contents is MUCH better for that kind of searching. It may even be better than thematic chapter/project titles. 20 years of my own lab notebooks. Hundreds of other people's notebooks. Yet this idea, which could have been invented 200 years ago, comes as a revelation to me.
