In this week’s Nature, Sydney Brenner and Richard Roberts lament the ephemeral nature of online information storage, which may lead to irreparable gaps in the anthropological side of the scientific record. In passionate language, they urge scientists to save their notebooks and correspondence and donate them to historians.
Of course I agree that such materials should be preserved, which is probably why I can’t bring myself to throw away the two boxes of gently moulding lab notebooks, spanning thirteen years of research, stashed up in the loft. I’m sure these are not the papers that Brenner and Roberts had in mind, though – they want to preserve the detritus of the Watsons and Cricks of this world, not of ordinary research folk like me.
But then I got to wondering. Why not? My lab notebooks might make pretty compelling reading to some future historian starved for scraps of how 99.9% of (non-celebrity) researchers spent their days and nights in the lab. Why not document the parade of meaningless or ambiguous data that make up most researchers’ records? The ‘non-Eureka moments’, if you will? The missing bands, the sickly cultures, the yeast-infested Petri plates, the unligated plasmids, the blank films? (I am still amazed that I used to carefully, almost lovingly, trim those squares of utterly blank x-ray film and tape them in for the record, as if it wouldn’t have just been enough to write “It didn’t work. Again.”)
And let us not forget the expletives. A good Midwestern American girl, I tried to keep the notebook language polite, but some of my colleagues’ entries rivalled James Kelman’s Booker Prize-winning novel How Late It Was, How Late, which famously used the F-word an average of 25 times a page.
And then of course there are the stains, telling their own poignant tales. I actually have tear-stained pages, produced one evening when I had to go into the lab after a major relationship break-up. Blood, of course (just paper cuts, I hasten to add, as opposed to episodes of violent post-doctoral jealousy). Various laboratory substances: Coomassie blue, methyl red, ethidium bromide pink, bacterial broth brown. I have no doubt that if you checked with a handy Geiger counter, some of the pages would still be faintly radioactive.
Seed magazine might be ahead of the game in this cultural revival. Recognizing the hidden art behind everyday experimental write-ups, one issue last year featured a two-page ‘Anatomy of a scientific notebook’ in which two real notebook pages were reproduced in full size and annotated. The only thing was, this notebook was obviously from outer space. It was written in perfect calligraphy and perfect prose. And not a stain in sight.
So let’s embrace our grungy, mediocre notebooks and preserve them for posterity, even if no historian would touch them with a ten-foot barge pole. Who knows what stories they might one day tell?
Firstly, you don’t look very old – you may yet become a celeb so deffo save the books – might be worth a bit on Ebay. Secondly, this is reminiscent of the Mass Observation project where ordinary people record their lives for posterity (it’s been going since the start of the last century). Historians have to trawl through a lot of dross but they do find diamonds (see Simon Garfield book about the post-WW2 years called Our Hidden Lives). Thirdly, when I did post-doc in the U.S. they made us leave our notebooks for IP reasons – I hope they don’t look inside. Fourthly, I don’t know why I am admitting this but when I do ‘morning pages’ (write 3 sides stream-of-consciousness upon waking each morn – an idea for nurturing creativity from Julia Cameron) I sometimes find myself addressing ‘the archivist’ as if someone will read it – wot a saddo.
Hey, you’re not sad—I’m in strong favor of the ‘dear reader’ novelistic style of lab notebook entry. (Even as we speak, an intellectual property dispute is being successfully squelched because of my tendency to record way too much information.) Also, pity the poor PhD student who may one day look upon your pages as a shining beacon of light to help her navigate her way through her first unsupervised miniprep!
1. Step 1: Pick up the pipettor.
2. Step 2: Load the tip.
....
Almost everything important that I wrote in the lab while doing the PhD was written first on paper towel and then stuck into my lab book.
In my last little post-doc before coming to Nature, though, I had the slightly odd experience of keeping a lab book according to ‘Good Laboratory Practice’ guidelines. No paper towels anywhere. Anything stuck in had to have a signature over the edge; each page was signed and countersigned (by someone who had read and understood it); all the empty space was neatly crossed off; oh so many experimental details….
Perhaps the comparison between the two styles of record keeping would be interesting; I am pretty sure that you would find it difficult to believe that both were written by the same person! :)
Bronwen, a tear is brought to my eye remembering the humble paper towel, which should have its just homage in my blog. Even more ephemeral, the marker pen scribbles imprinted upon them, resistant to water but utterly vulnerable to the onslaughts of alcohol, like a chromatography experiment gone horribly, horribly wrong…
Oh how I know what you are talking about!
While I seriously doubt that my notebook could ever be of use to anyone, I should probably put a PG-13 rating on the cover (ok. R ). For language, of course. The last few months, the tops of my tamer notebook entries have looked a little something like this:
Purpose: GRADUATION. Please.
Nothing like desperation to get the point of the experiment across!
If you do plan on keeping this stuff long-term I would suggest that at some point you should make a plan as to what will happen to it after your demise. Otherwise all that paper lovingly stored by you may just get dumped by relatives who know no better.
I think the bigger problem is not the paper notebooks etc, but all the correspondence and documents now in electronic files with no paper version. These are the things that historians in future will find fascinating – who said what to whom.
Spoken like a true librarian, Frank. It’s a good point about the email correspondence being more interesting, and I think a lot of us don’t bother saving messages long-term. Email program formats go obsolete, for example—I lost a lot when I switched from Eudora to Outlook. Maybe scientists should start keeping scrapbooks of their best email exchanges…a bit of a lottery, though, as you have to decide if that postdoc you met at a drunken poster session will one day be famous!
So what do you guys think about the electronic notebook? There are several vendors and an industry association promoting its use. I’ve heard they’re used in industry more than in academia.
You can’t sellotape a gel into an electronic lab book, so until the rest of the lab goes digital…
I can personally vouch that sellotaped gels start to look pretty pathetic after 13 years in a mouldy loft!
Now I’m not exactly a Luddite, but I am a bit skeptical about the long-term reliability of digital storage. Experts have pointed out that format changes in disks and file types could lead to future problems over the very long term.
Corie, I also wonder if it would be easier to do some retrospective fudging of an electronic notebook than of a paper one, thereby facilitating fraud?
Here’s an interesting bit from the New York Times Book Review about authors’ correspondence in the age of email and what it means for historical records. Jonathan Franzen touches on the temptation to create your own flattering digital narratives, and Dave Eggers’ agent muses about releasing a 10-volume set of his collected outbox.
Thanks Jonathan. Interesting implication that traditional autobiographies are somehow not prone to reinventing history…not sure I believe that there could be much difference!
And I’m getting a headache just thinking about such a Eggers-fest.
I love the fluent, friendly style of writing that appears here – and possibly in your old lab notebooks. I strongly encourage researchers to capture this natural conversational style in the papers that they submit for publication. This would make the reading experience much more enjoyable than the current tortured syle that dominates science journals!
Linda, I am completely in agreement and admire your tenacity towards what must often feel like a futile cause. In my editorial experience in the peer-reviewed journals side of things, I have come to believe that a lot of authors mistrust a lighter, more readable style as this may come across as less rigorous (or worse, frivolous). Constructions like the passive voice are embraced as imparting some sort of stamp of intellectualism—whereas taking credit for the work with a sweepingly active-voice ‘we’ could be perceived as allowing too much ego into the report. But there you go—traditionalists die hard. In the meantime, I think editors have a role to play in encouraging their scientist authors to unfasten the first few buttons of their white coats, if you know what I mean!
Jennifer,It’s not so much futile as challenging. Most scientists – and editors – I know readily agree that ‘something’ has to change. They all struggle when they read papers outside and inside (!)their fields because the literature is so universally inaccessible. No one denies this. What I have to convince people to believe is that although it’s much more difficult to construct a precise and accessible article, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages (time away from the bench, discomfort with a new style of writing, attachment to the old paradigm).I guess that it’s also a question of convincing them that they need to devote more time on writing up and revising their results. Again, most researchers I know leave the writing part of the process until the very end when time is tight – and ther’s not enough time devoted to revising. And finally, in my experience, I’m always amazed how the process of revising brings the writer to a clearer understanding of their important contribution – as opposed to the sea of other data – and once they have this greater clarity of purpose – their writing inevitably improves. Now all I have to do is make them believe this is true – and to offer their students courses on Science Writing!
Do people donate their notebooks to labs when they move on (either to new labs or out of the scientific profession)? From some of the comments above it sounds as if people take their notebooks with them. I can see that it then becomes quite a challenge to save them for posterity in such a distributed format!
However, I think that the paper format has advantages over e-format, thinking of all the problems I’ve had with back-up disks, etc, that have become obsolete before I have realised, and hence before I’ve backed up the back up onto something more modern. Wouldn’t this be a problem with e-books?
Maybe we’ll all have to created a back-up back-up on something like connotea or Norton ghost. A bit too highly organised for me, I’m afraid!
It’s all a bit of a muddle, Maxine. Increasingly, because of IP concerns, institutes force you to leave your books behind, meaning that you have to frantically photocopy for days on end if you are taking your project with you and need to refer back to older experiments in the future. But usually these books just get warehoused and I suspect after some legally agreed period of time they are probably destroyed. Which is a real shame. I know people (ahem) who have spirited their books away regardless, and no one has ever complained.
At the Royal Society, I know of one cataloguer who noticed that there were many old stains on a Fellow’s lab book she was cataloguing, on pages dscribing experiments to do with chemical nasties, she brought in her own gloves.
Perhaps you should self-annotate the stains, for future posterity/ease of cataloguing?
I love it!
Splodge A: droplet of Starbuck’s tall decaf skinny latte (which I wasn’t supposed to be drinking in the lab anyway!)
“droplet of Starbuck’s tall decaf skinny latte”
Decaf and skinny? What’s the bloody point of that, eh?
Gimme high-octane chunky fat-filled coffee. Actually, no: Make mine a double espresso from Azzuri’s. . . mmmmm
The decaf skinny typically would have been after about my tenth cup of normal brew, possibly after midnight – hence the shaking hands leading to said splodge in the first place!
So why bother with ‘coffee’ at all?
Oh wait, it was Starbucks. It’s not coffee.
In our lab days Jen, it was much more likely to have been red wine. Doubt we’d get away with that now! Nor the mouldy plates stacked high on the shelves above, next to the PBS.
Have you splodged any REAL beer on your lab book down under yet Richard?
Heh heh. I wondered how Trevor found the Labrats, and now I know. Nice to ‘see’ you again Nicola, ‘Senior’ Editor now? That’s cool. When are Nature going to send you to Oz again?
I was going to make a very rude comment about red wine. How the hell did you manage to spill that on your notebook? Must have been a posh lab. And were the mouldy plates dinner plates: Trevor hasn’t done the washing-up, again?
Spilling it on notebooks is about all the beer here is good for. There are some nice brews, usually limited editions, if you can find them. We’ve started making our own in response to this drought, but really the state of my liver is not a topic to be discussed here! :)
Hi Nic, long time no see! Personally, I have the fondest memories of our champagne-in-the-beaker tradition after paper publication. Champagne having the advantage of being largely invisible on the printed page!
Do you remember Andy Fraser’s mouldy tupperware?
Champagne in the beaker? How common.
We used to use glass 50 ml measuring cylinders.
I’m working on another trip to the land of Oz (and NZ), no worries! Aren’t 50ml measuring cylinders a bit slim for champers? Plenty of scope for sticking ones little finger out at the side though.
I remember most mouldy things in the lab with fondness, including ‘pets corner’. It’s amazing what will grow in an opened bottle of LB; we could have supplied extras for Dr Who.