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An engineering notebook is a hardcover book used to document an engineer’s work, including notes, data, and calculations. It serves as a record of an engineer’s efforts and can be used to confirm conclusions, estimate future projects, and provide justification for decisions. Entries must be made in chronological order, with no blank pages or spaces, and errors should be crossed out with a single line. The notebook may be used in legal proceedings and should be kept in a standardized and uniform way.
An engineering notebook is basically any type of hardcover book that contains notes, data, calculations, and other information based on first-hand observations of various tests or experiments. Most professional engineers keep these kinds of logs as a matter of course in their work. The contents will necessarily be somewhat different according to the specificities of the discipline; a civil engineer who focuses on the design and support of buildings will have different thinking and calculations than one who focuses on roads, aerospace or heavy machinery, for example. Likewise, there are a number of logging standards that apply more or less across the board. Careful note-taking is very often essential to the success or failure of most projects, and well-archived, uniform notes can help leaders track progress and also identify problems. In some cases these notebooks are also an important part of legal processes, particularly in cases of liability disputes for accidents or mechanical breakdowns.
Main purpose
The primary purpose of this type of notebook is to offer sequential written documentation of the efforts of an engineer or engineering team on a given project. It provides an important record of an engineer’s or inventor’s work and can usually be thought of as the equivalent of a technical journal. In this capacity it has a number of important functions. An engineering notebook consolidates data for easy access, for example, allowing an author to confirm conclusions, details or dates. It can also reveal previous trends and can provide useful information for estimating the time or effort required for future projects. In some cases it may also offer a memory refresher on fact points or lines of inquiry that have been investigated and may offer justification for future decisions or courses of action.
Registration basics
In general all data should be recorded directly in the notebook in chronological order, including notes and calculations with as much detail as possible. For experiments and inventions, explicit details and dates of origin of an idea usually need to be entered, along with specifics about the development process and ways in which discoveries were made.
How information is recorded is often as important as the data itself. Scientifically accepted guidelines generally dictate that the notebook should be bound and the pages should be numbered to ensure continuity. All entries must be written in indelible ink by the author and must be clearly signed and dated. No blank pages or spaces should be kept, and pages should never be removed; errors can be crossed out with a single line, and a small dated notation should refer to a page where the correction is found. If needed, items can be recorded in the notebook with a handwritten title and date.
Primary contents
There is no universal set of requirements when it comes to what an engineering notebook should contain, and much depends on the individual practitioner and the norms of their specific discipline. Sometimes these are kept more or less for personal reasons, as is often the case with inventors and people who work for small businesses or as freelancers. In these contexts diaries can provide a record of past work much like a portfolio and can help a person track thought processes and discoveries as they occur.
In larger companies and professional engineering organizations, project managers and leaders often have specific requirements for things that people on the engineering team must record. The details are usually very important. This usually includes how a design or invention works, observations on experimentation, results, and other specific things that the engineer notices.
In some contexts, important events or results may need to be verified by a non-inventor colleague who witnesses the work being done. This is often the case when engineers try to get patent protection for their creations. In these cases witnesses are usually required to make their own notations in the notebook, then sign a “Detected and understood by” clause on the relevant pages.
Legal ramifications
Engineering notebooks are sometimes subpoenaed as evidence in court, and for this reason it is very important that they are kept in a standardized and uniform way. Courts are usually more interested in rumors when describing experiments or inventions subject to protection, often with a patent; they can also be useful in matters of disputed ownership. In liability cases a court may search notebooks for evidence that engineers followed the correct protocol, often to ascertain whether problems with the final product were due to a technician’s negligence or improper procedures in the early stages.
