Lab Notebooks

Below is a compendium of best practices for keeping a digital lab notebook. This is intended for those in our lab group, however comments and suggestions are welcome.

An online lab notebook is required of all lab members. Entries need to be organized by date and in reverse chronological order, and Updated daily.

Notebooks

Person	Notebook	Commitment
Xyrus Maurer-Alcalá	xxmalcala.github.io
Shama Hasan	shamahasan.github.io
Lucy Brennan	lkbrennan5.github.io

Platforms

The current recommendation is ... not totally certain yet!

Make sure it is reproducible

Document in a fashion where someone could replicate your work.

Document daily

A record of your work should be published each day of activity! Even if you feel like you did nothing, post something to describe what you did that day.

Did you read some papers? Amazing! Make a post that lists the papers you read and link to your annotated bibliography.

Did you spend all day searching the web? Also great! Make a post about what you were searching for and how successful you were in finding what you wanted. This can be an immensely helpful resource for others in the lab too, as you may have stumbled across something amazing without necessarily realizing it!

Maintain backup

Have a copy of your notebook in another location. This could be done in several ways. - composing in text editor and hosting on GitHub - using IFTTT to post/save entries elsewhere - run script (i.e. wget) to archive contents

Periodically, you will be asked to show where your backup is and demonstrate that it is functional.

All GitHub-based notebooks will be backed up somewhere... Xyrus will figure this out...