how to keep a lab notebook

this is one suggestion for using obsidian to keep a lab notebook

organization

├── attachments     
│	└── ...
├── templates       
│	└── ...
├── notes           
│	└── ...
│
├── 000 home        					   
├── 010 projects    
├── 020 random

explanation of the organization

• attachments/ - a folder that contains all of the images, pdfs, or other files that you import into obsidian. these can be embedded into other notes with ![[ ]] notation
• templates/ - a folder that contains your template files. some example templates I use are for my daily notes, new notes, and literature notes.
• notes/ - where all of your markdown files live. all of the notes you write can be found here. you dont necessarily need more hierarchical organization beyond this because searching for notes is very powerful, backlinks add some sort of structure, and your hub notes will help organize further.
• 000 home - your home note can help orient yourself or others to the vault. you may include some links for initial jumping off points. can also explain further how you organize your lab notebook or your vault.
• 010 projects - a file to organize your hub notes about projects your working on (more on hub notes below)
  • outside of hub notes, what else goes in these files??
• 020 random - maybe you have hub notes about random things, or want to organize thoughts that are not immediately related to a specific research project. just using this mostly as a placeholder to show you can have more than just research project related files in your vault

daily notes

• can be titled something like YYYY-MM-DD (2023-11-08)
• daily notes can be segmented with headings for each project
  • then talk about everything you worked on that day
  • should contain your thoughts, ideas, failures, notes about experiments etc
• never delete anything :) if using daily notes for lab notebook

hub notes

use hub notes to organize projects

version controlling

text files are not immutable like pen on paper unfortunately. If changes are made, that edit history gets lost and may lead to issues if someone in the future were to go back through my lab notebook. In an effort to keep track of changes and prevent any confusion or question of integrity, I am pushing my entire folder of notes to a private github repo. This serves two purposes. It keeps track of all of the changes Ive made and timestamps them. it also serves as another backup in case I lose any notes.

how to backup and timestamp digital lab notebook

🐛 | ⨳ how to

references

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foundations meeting led by sama