I was just able to help out my postdoc by pulling an old Bell Labs notebook from 11.5 years ago off my bookshelf and showing him a schematic of an electrical measurement technique. This is an object lesson in why it is a good idea to keep a clear, complete lab notebook! I try very hard to impress upon undergrad and graduate students alike that it's critically important to keep good notes, even (perhaps especially) in these days of electronic data acquisition and analysis. I've never once looked back and regretted how much time I spent writing things down, or how much paper I used - good record keeping has saved my bacon (and lots of time) on multiple occasions. Unfortunately, with rare exceptions, students come in to the university (at the undergrad or grad levels) and seem determined to write as little as possible down using as few sheets of paper as they can manage. Somewhere along the way (before grad school, though my thesis advisor was outstanding about this), it got pounded into my brain: if you didn't document it, you didn't do it. Perhaps we should make a facebook-like or twitter-like application that would sucker student researchers into obsessively updating their work status....
Man, I wish I was better at updating my lab books. It is such a valuable skill and really takes practice. It needs to be not just schematics and procedures, either-- writing down ideas (and who suggested them) is a really important step for making them much for useful and coherent.
ReplyDeleteOne tool that people may find useful is Evernote.It's a bit like del.icio.us, but works for recording and organizing pretty much anything you throw at it. It supports tagging for easy indexing/searching, image text recognition and can synch up with the cloud. As much as that sounds like ad copy, it's definitely worth checking out.
Doug...
ReplyDeleteIn my whopping 4 years of teaching, getting students to keep good lab notebooks has always been a struggle.I teach two lab courses each year and am always amazed at how students fail to keep good lab notes. This is after spending a lot of time discussing what makes a good lab book and emphasizing that it is a significant portion of their grade for the course. I like your idea of twittering lab notebooks. We need to make an "ap" for that. Students will often ask if there is a form that I can provide them with that they can use instead. I imagine that it is only a matter of time before we all get memos from provosts/deans admonishing us for required use of antiquated writing utensils such as pens and pencils...
Happy New Year...JasonD
"if you didn't document it, you didn't do it" - a most excellent sentiment. It does, however, beg the question: did you actually write that blog post? I'll need to see your blog notebook.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was in the pharmaceutical industry rules were very strict for lab notebooks. They had to be signed and dated, then witnessed by another person usually not your boss. You had to cross out with one line, date and initial. You had to "X" out blank pages and write "intentionally left blank". If you taped any data pages or spectra into the notebook, you had to indicate there was nothing underneath. The notebooks were copied onto microfilm (there was a department dedicated to that) and the photographic files were stored in a secure storage facility. You could get fired for not keeping a good notebook. Look at all the patent litigation that goes on in the pharmaceutical industry and it makes sense.
ReplyDeleteMany times students leave our group without even putting their names on the first page; no table of contents; no dates; no signatures. With so much characterization of undefined materials (organic molecules are pretty well defined compared to the graphene/nanotube materials we work with here) by STM, AFM, etc., the whole picture is difficult to obtain without the spectra being in the notebook.
Dustin
Of course, when I left graduate school the student who took over my project said he had a lot of trouble reading my writing. I thought I kept a good notebook but apparently my writing is not so good. I am not sure that Twitter or Facebook would solve that problem.
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