McKinney:Labbook

The Laboratory Notebook

In order to have a unified format for lab notebooks that we can still get to after a person has left, please conform to this format.

Keep your lab notebook in a common word processor (MS Office or OpenOffice.org). Keep the file on the McKinney lab SMB share, in a subdirectory of 'Lab books' (for instance, Fred Ross's lab book is in /Lab books/Fred). This is backed up by the IT department, so you won't lose your data. Also print it out and keep it in a binder. Suzanne has plastic page protectors and binders.

Keep all parts of an experiment together, listed under the first day of the experiment, no matter how much later you did parts of the experiment.

Format the page with the date (as yyyy-mm-dd, yyyy/mm/dd, yyyy.mm.dd, or whatever separator you want) at the top right corner.

Keep a table of contents by date with a short description of each experiment under that day.

Keep separate notebooks for experiments, animal experiments, plasmid construction, and strain construction. All these things proceed on different time scales, so it is inconvenient to have them together. If you are mathematically inclined, you will also want a separate (possibly hard bound) notebook for calculations and theory work.

Strain and Plasmid Lists

Keep your own record of strains, plasmids, primers, etc., and also put all the relevant data in the lab software (we'll get to this when it's set up...)