Lab Notebook Guidelines

If you are a "power user" of ArcGIS and don't have that much to take note of during a particular lab, that is completely up to you. Hence there would not be a great level of detail for that week's notebook entry. There should, however, be something new that you learn each week. The idea is to make note of things that are new to YOU personally or perhaps a bit difficult for YOU to remember.

There are no "points" involved in the "grading" of the lab notebook requirement by the TAs. It is merely a presence/absence, pass/fail check by the TA to see that you are doing it, and there is definitely no comparison with the notebooks of other students. The lab notebook is not a quiz, it is not a test, nor is it an attempt to impugn your character in any way! It IS an attempt to get you into a very useful habit that has been shown to be incredibly useful in professional practice.

REQUIREMENTS:
Content: Your notebook should contain the following items

1. A list of NEW commands learned (i.e., commands that are new to YOU at this stage in your learning). This should simply be a statement of the command, what it does, and where to find it in the ArcGIS menu structure.
2. A list of NEW procedures learned. This should outline the basic steps that are required to perform a task. For example, if you need to reproject a map, list the steps necessary to do this task. Don't worry about writing a whole treatise on the subject. Keep in mind that these are YOUR personal notes, for YOUR own benefit. Again, your TAs evaluate lab notebooks only on a presence/absence, pass/fail basis.
3. A short description of the various data sets that you use (including whether or not there was any associated metadata), and any conversion or processing steps that you did in order to make them more useable in ArcGIS.

EXAMPLE:
Here is a short example of a lab notebook entry (pdf). In this example, these items were NEW to the student who made the entry. These items may not necessarily be new to you, but should give you an idea of how to document those commands, procedures and datasets that ARE new to you. The use of screen snapshots of individual icons or windows can be very helpful, but it is optional.