> I agree with RFB. It's more a procedural thing like doubling angles or setting the PPM's.
Choosing how to keep your field notes (bound or loose) can hardly be equated to the necessity of doubling angles or setting instrument ppms! You bound book guys need to come off your high horses lol.
Well Butch. I just said that my choice of bound was because of my training. I'm not against loose leaf or such but it's just not what I did when surveying. No high horse nor a slight against those that use another method.
Actually in the last 10 years then most of my stuff was in a data collector and very few notes in any sort of field book.
Mostly sketches that helped in the understanding of the data.
> Actually in the last 10 years then most of my stuff was in a data collector and very few notes in any sort of field book.
>
> Mostly sketches that helped in the understanding of the data.
:good:
I like to right down measure ups and rod heights too. hard to catch, easy to make a mistake, easy to fix if you check the book against the raw file.
I will also make a sketch of the control, making it easy to see what, came from where.
It's the Chain of Evidence that's important
Contemporaneous hand-written notes are admissable as physical evidence in a Court. I have used them frequently, occasionally xerographic copies have been admitted into evidence as individual exhibits. It does not matter to the Court whether they are loose-leaf or sewn-in pages; what matters is that a chain of evidence can be proven. Since my experience has been with my own notes, there was no question regarding the chain of evidence.
In the case of a deceased author, the chain of evidence still must be proven to be valid. (That's the Attorney's job.)
Exactly right about the control and verticle info....and a bound book, with the pages copied after and stuck in the field folder, gives you some lineage on your work. Take a bound FB, with all those neat formulas in the back, (that no new kid understands), put it in your vest pocket, and write down stuff. That way when you get back in the office, with your BS actually swapped with where you were set....well you older guys get it!!! Give me a sketch, verts. even if you aren't doing topo, point numbers used for occupation, and pts. used for that setup...well I will figure out where you humped it!!
It's the Chain of Evidence that's important
I disagree with debunking the method of keeping the books because of citing court cases....(but that would be a good argument for sure). We have bound books in our files dating back 100 years. The pages stay in order and don't get messed up. There are ties to section corners that are long gone (the corner monuments that is). There are original notes to corners that were misrepresented on the later plat.
A person could certainly see, if you were arguing where a controling corner once was, how saying it was at a certain location and showing your field book ties from a loose-leaf paper or from a paper that had erased measurements that were later changed, might be forced to go to dismissal by a sharp lawyer. And what if you were arguing where a building was once staked and you had notes that were tampered with. you might be paying big bucks for the relocation. The surveyor is often the first guy that gets pointed at when something goes wrong. A company I worked for did go through litigation on a building that was in the wrong location.
Things have certainly changed with electronic field notes, but I am sure you could be in trouble if you can't prove you staked a building or set a corner in the place you said you did and the you-know-what hits the fan. (even if everything you did was correct and it was someone else's mistake).
I can't cite a case and we have lost the art of keeping all of the data in field books; but I would argue that you can have a better case to back up your work if you have original unerased bound field books.
It's the Chain of Evidence that's important
> A person could certainly see, if you were arguing where a controling corner once was, how saying it was at a certain location and showing your field book ties from a loose-leaf paper or from a paper that had erased measurements that were later changed, might be forced to go to dismissal by a sharp lawyer. And what if you were arguing where a building was once staked and you had notes that were tampered with.
I guess i don't see how having field book ties from loose-leaf paper might be forced to go to dismissal by a sharp lawyer anymore than a bound book anyways, if both are original/untampered. Nor do I understand the second part of your statement that somehow loose-leaf notes are seemingly automatically predicated to have been tampered with (or erased), while bound notes are not.
Government agencies seem to favor loose leaf.
I refuse to use loose leaf. I use bound books that I provide to myself.
I lost a file; I can't figure out what I did with that stinkin' file. Thank gawd I have my field book because if I had loose leaf notes they would be in the lost file.
I don't see the big advantage of loose-leaf. However remote, the possibility that somebody will suspect that some pages were removed and replaced is real. What we do is after every field job, we throw the bound book on the copy machine and put the copies in the file. To me, that used to seem to me a waste of paper and toner, but the old system that most of us forgot to do was to write the field book number on the front of the file.
In the late 70's, I lost book #116. I think it's under an apartment building off of Fair Oaks Blvd. in Sacramento. I still hang my head in shame because that's the only field book from Book #1 in the late 50's that's missing.
been my experience that field books go missing alot more than job files. How many jobs/projects would one stand to lose if the bound field book gets lost or misplaced?
Butch - That's why we immediately make copies and put them in the file now. If you put the loose-leaf pages in the file and lose the file, then what? And I still stand by the position that if the field notes became an issue in court, a removable set of notes from a loose-leaf notebook or notes from either a bound or loose-leaf book with erasures in any critical area would give the other side ammunition. The thing is, it would be hard to recreate a whole bound field book with certain dirt stains on some pages and coffee stains on other pages and rain damage on others than it would be to pull a couple of pages with incriminating evidence and replace them with "good" data.
Then, let's face it, the trig diagrams in the back of the book are pretty helpful if you have a brain-freeze after relying on a data collector too long.
I do that too; put copies in the file.
> I don't see the big advantage of loose-leaf. However remote, the possibility that somebody will suspect that some pages were removed and replaced is real. What we do is after every field job, we throw the bound book on the copy machine and put the copies in the file. To me, that used to seem to me a waste of paper and toner, but the old system that most of us forgot to do was to write the field book number on the front of the file.
>
> In the late 70's, I lost book #116. I think it's under an apartment building off of Fair Oaks Blvd. in Sacramento. I still hang my head in shame because that's the only field book from Book #1 in the late 50's that's missing.
That is why I greatly prefer loose-leaf. I put them in a binder in a cabinet, not in a job file.
I do have one project that is a monitoring project where I run the same level circuit over and over again.
I have forms made up for that where I just fill in the blanks then later key it into an Excel Worksheet.
I do make exceptions.
> That is why I greatly prefer loose-leaf. I put them in a binder in a cabinet, not in a job file.
I scan my field notes and compile them in a pdf file. Kept with the field data files and backed up. If a book ever goes missing, I'll have a copy.
I definitely should be scanning them too.
> I definitely should be scanning them too.
We scan a great deal of our stuff. Our paper files are rather thin. Pretty soon a box of paper will cost more than a Terrabyte of storage. To say nothing of retrievability and space considerations.
It's the Chain of Evidence that's important
> I guess i don't see how having field book ties from loose-leaf paper might be forced to go to dismissal by a sharp lawyer anymore than a bound book anyways, if both are original/untampered. Nor do I understand the second part of your statement that somehow loose-leaf notes are seemingly automatically predicated to have been tampered with (or erased), while bound notes are not.
New pages can be written on and inserted in with loose-leaf pages. A page can be thrown away and replaced. It is more difficult to tamper with bound notes. Your key phrase "if both are original/untampered" is important. how do you prove it.
I have erased and used loose-leaf notes. I am only saying that you will have stronger evidence, if they are original bound notes. Nothing is "automatically predicated" to have been tampered with, but a good lawyer can shed more doubt on notes that are loose-leaf and that have been erased and changed.