Lab Notebooks (2020)

> instead of asking you they can self-serve. It’s pretty common that by the time they need it you would no longer be at the company.

All lab notebooks are company property. You don't keep them locked away in your desk or take them with you when you leave. Any current or future employee with the right clearances should be able to serve themselves to the entire archive. No need to ask the original author.

Searchability is by far the most significant advantage of electronic documents, but you can get pretty far with paper notebooks if you keep a decent table of contents. Even better if you regularly scan, OCR, and upload your pages to the archive. IMO the inconvenience of scanning is greatly outweighed by the paper notebook's guarantee of immutability. Tools like Notion make it too easy to erase information, either accidentally or not.

I started working at a lab where I am the only SWE and everyone else is a scientist. I have a lab notebook, but I don't use it properly (thankfully nobody gets on my case about it). I usually just use it as a short-term working memory, but it helps me keep track of the progress I've made. It's nice to look back on something I was working on two months ago and see all my thoughts written down about which library to use or architecture to use. Looking back at my past struggles gives me a sense of accomplishment and progress.

That said, I usually try to preserve the results of my "experimentation" in documentation with the software, so I can share it with others. It's a good sign when people never talk about X to me, and I end up asking them if they ever used X and they tell me "I just used your documentation". Best feeling ever.

Absolutely not. My working / lab notes capture raw thoughts, often abbreviated and with shortcuts taken. Others would have trouble gleaning much meaning from them, with so many scratched out words, wildly drawn arrows, and peculiar diagrams.

Take my raw notes, rewrite them for another audience, and post those on Notion? Maybe. But it's likely a different document (an essay, tutorial, FAQ) could be rewritten out of my notes, one which would be more useful for my teammates.

The important point is that the raw notes are for the note-taker. They not only document what you thought, they are themselves a part of and tool for the thinking process. Writing is thinking[1], and the initial results aren't going to be very useful for someone else, because they'll be rambling and messy, with lots of false starts, errors, and just wrong ideas. They're for the author to remember the path to the outcome[2], they are not the outcome itself.

For the rest of the team, those raw notes are source material. That can be the input into lightweight documents like technical memos and decision records.

1. https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/writing...

2. https://posts.oztamir.com/the-opposite-of-forgetting-is-writ...

To your specific point, the legal issues are so idiosyncratic. You can’t write an article about them. You can’t tease out the difference between “this is a best practice everyone should follow” and “the patent lawyer is selling the holistic social experience of compliance,” which is the non-trial attorney’s primary product. It’s the same energy as DocuSign: when your biggest competitor is a pen, you know all the bullshit they peddle about timestamps and tracking and custody is just that, bullshit.

It really comes down to, what is your role? Are you making discoveries or working for people who do? Both are very worthy. In my experience, the PIs - and their subordinates who become PIs - they aren’t thinking very hard about lab notebooks and their tactics vary widely. No best practices. However they are focused on maximizing the amount of serendipity they can have per unit time, which tends to devalue how you’re documenting stuff for patent lawyers.

Does Benchling have a manifesto about why you should care about lab notebooks? No. It has a ton of little reactive opinions that are relevant to its sales pipeline. But nothing like “Agile, except for life sciences” which incorporates their software. It’s everything to all people, like most life science software. I know people receive huge grants on promising discoveries in life sciences, and some of their labs have Benchling licenses and don’t use them. The people first authoring the papers use lab notebooks of course, but see this as a small part of their process.