How are Researchers Documenting Their Day-to-Day Activities?

Abstract

We undertook a pilot project to evaluate the feasibility of launching a full-scale research project to investigate best practices of researchers at our institution for keeping lab notebooks. Our objectives are to learn about practices already present on campus through a series of faculty interviews, and analyze those practices based on their similarities or differences, their compliance with modern technology, and ease of use and access, as well as to suggest other practices based on our review of tools reported in the literature.

We focused on a narrowly defined group of researchers to obtain a more useful set of conclusions upon which to launch a full-scale project. After obtaining IRB exemption(HUM00147763), we emailed a biology department at our institution, our sample population, to explain the project and ask for volunteers. We interviewed six research faculty from that department at our institution about their recordkeeping practices, print vs. electronic notebook use, data and protocol sharing within the lab, and standard policies. Interviews were recorded and transcribed, and the transcripts were coded and analyzed.

The results provide a snapshot of current disciplinary practice, which is useful as a benchmark for longitudinal studies of this community as campus-supported electronic tools for research documentation are expected to become more widely available in the coming years. They also suggest points of need where the library might productively offer services within the current paradigm to improve access to and preservation of day-to-day research documentation.