Data Management

Lab Notebooks 

• • Each team member will actively keep a lab notebook for documenting their work done in the lab. Keeping a good lab notebook is an incredibly important skill to develop early and continue to practice rigorously. This will be useful not only to you in the future when writing methods for manuscripts, troubleshooting protocols, repeating experiments, etc, but also to those who come after you and want to replicate or build upon your work.

  • When in doubt, err on the side of over-documentation of everything you do in lab. I promise, a future version of yourself will thank you. And no, three months from now you will not remember that thing you thought was obvious and you would have no problem remembering – just write it down!!

Data Reporting 

• • From a legal standpoint, is important to remember that the data you generate in lab is not just yours, it also belongs to Purdue and the funding agencies that make it possible for us to do the work. As a PI, I am required to submit progress reports and other documentation of the work being done in our lab. This means your data must be stored in a way that I can access it at any time AND decipher what the files are. The easier you make this for me, the less I will bother you asking you to help me find things!!

  • I will leave it up to you to determine how to name your files in terms of identifying experiments/samples, but I ask that all files start with a date in the format YYYYMMDD for consistency across the lab

Data Storage 

• All data MUST be stored in at least 2 places: (1) your folder in the group Box folder and (2) the group hard drive. My suggestion would be regular backups to the dropbox folder, and a single upload to the group hard drive upon completion of each project. You are welcome (and encouraged) to keep your files stored on your own personal storage systems in addition to these two platforms.