The unsung scientific record
There is a very chatty conversaton happening at the above post on MInd the Gap, Jennifer Rohn's Nature Network blog. Jennifer's post is about the plea In Nature by Sydney Brenner and Richard Roberts to scientists to save their notebooks and correspondence and donate them to historians.
Jennifer writes: "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? "
Join in the conversation here or at the Mind the Gap post's comments section, which has taken some fascinating tracks along avenues of clear communication and the virtue of electronic notebooks as well as the importance of a good cup of coffee.