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Lab Notebook Guidelines
OBJECTIVE:
The objective of the lab notebook is for you to create your own personal
ArcGIS "cookbook" or user manual. In this notebook you will keep notes on
the commands and procedures that you use during this course to complete your
labs. By the end of the course you should have your own personalized reference
source to which you can refer to later to review the procedures you have
learned. The reason for doing this notebook is so that you will know where to
find the information that YOU need about ArcGIS without having to return to
user manuals or help files. It will also be of great help to you in future
GIS courses or activities that you may become involved in, or for creating
a "cookbook" for a more complex GIS analysis.
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
Last updated May 25, 2009
http://dusk.geo.orst.edu/arc/notebook.html