Lab Notebook Best Practices
We have been using online lab notebooks since 2007 and the platforms and workflows have certainly changed over the years. Below is a compendium of best practices based on our experience and the particular research we do. This is intended for those in our lab group, however comments and suggestions are welcome.
For most, Wordpress is recommended ie
Document in a fashion where someone could replicate your work
A record of your work should be published the day of activity.
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 (ie wget) to archive contents
Data including intermediate analysis needs be have a url. This most often means it will live on a NAS.
Archiving data
In many instances you will be generating new data, taking photos, or there will be some other file type that you will need to include in your notebook. There are a couple of means to upload data to eagle. The most straight forward means is to navigate to http://owl.fish.washington.edu/, click on login, enter in the given username and password. Navigate to >File Station > web > vvvvvvv. Create a folder in vvvvvvvand upload your content in this folder. Then you can go to http://eagle.fish.washington.edu/scaphapoda/ and view any file. Within in the wiki you can embed files using the given url of a file on eagle.
Please refrain from using any non alpha-numeric (including spaces) in file and folder names