[OWW-Discuss] Does anyone have any tips on keeping your lab book on OWW?

[Barry Canton]

Hi John, I keep my lab notebook on a mediawiki installation (private
because I try to organize the rest of my life on it too:)).  Right
now, I just have a page for each day, where each day is a subpage of
each month which is a subpage of each year to aid navigation.

So currently, my lab notebook is organized chronologically.  I've been
thinking that since my lab notebook is a website, that I should really
organize it by project and just add dates at each particular step of
the project.  The reason being that when reading over a project it is
much easier if that project is described on one page or a set of pages
rather than distributed over a set of chronologically ordered pages
that aren't necessarily consecutive.  We are much more likely to ask -
"How did I do project X?" than to ask -  "What did I do in November
2004?".  If each project is annotated with the dates I did particular
actions, I can always search to find out what I did on a given day if
need be.  I accept that you could organize by date and then search for
all instances of "Project X" but that seems like a more awkward
approach assuming that you normally want to read about a project than
about a set of dates.

Seems to me the reason for organizing things chronologically is that
it is the only easy solution if you are using paper or even a word
document for you lab notebook.  Otherwise it seems somewhat inferior
to the notebook organized by project.

I'd love to hear if anyone has any experience with, or comments on, this idea.

Thanks,

Barry

On 1/31/07, John Cumbers <johncumbers at gmail.com> wrote:
> Does anyone have any tips on keeping your lab book on OWW?  If typing notes
> into a page, do you keep one page on edit and keep saving?  Do you use an
> external editor?   Do you write in wordpad and then paste into the wiki?
> Any tips appreciated, I've tried all the above and each one is a little
> painful in its own way..
>  cheers,
>  John
>
>
> --
>  John Cumbers,  Graduate Student in Computational Biology
> Brown University, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Box G-W
> 80 Waterman Street, Providence, Rhode Island, 02912, USA
> Tel USA: +1 401 523 8190,  Fax: +1 401 863-2166
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-- 
Barry Canton
Endy Lab
Biological Engineering Division
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Tel.:(617) 899 6062
Email1: bcanton at mit.edu
Email2: bcanton at gmail.com