lab notebooks

So here's something I've been thinking a lot about lately: lab notebooks.

Lab notebooks are something that I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with. I understand the value of a good lab notebook, and I try to write down everything that I do in it. I also find updating my lab notebook to be a rather tedious and annoying process. For the most part, my lab notebooks are reasonable, but the more complicated a project is and the more techniques I use, the more difficult I find keeping an accurate record to be, and my last lab notebook from this summer, while it contains everything that I did in it could be...uh...slightly better organized. When I was working on a project that was just organic synthesis, it was much easier to keep a good lab notebook.

But I guess, the strangest thing to me about lab notebooks is the fact that when you're done with a project, it stays in the lab with your boss. Of course it does; it's not your property. The record needs to be kept in case someone else needs to follow it. But it is a little strange to have something that's recorded in your handwriting, in your style, in a way that is comprehensible to you just gone, in someone else's hands forever. It's like parting with my diary, my record of my life for the past two months. It's strange.