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BIOL 354L: Animal Behavior (labs)

This guide is for students enrolled in BIOL 354L: Laboratory in Animal Behavior.

Managing Information

During your project, you're going to accumulate a lot of information: links, citations, pdfs, notes, drafts, images, data, and more. Have you thought about how you're going to keep track of it? Deciding how your group will manage and organize files before you actually start looking for information will save a lot of time.

Choose a Data Manager

The data manager’s job is to set up shared folders and files that everyone in the group can access and use. Choose one person in your group to be your group's data manager.

Data manager: set up a shared group folder and document

Organizing information

Now that your group has a central place to store and share files it's time to decide on an organization system. Ideally, file and folder names will mean something and be arranged in a logical system, that way help everyone in the group can easily locate the correct files.

Think about what kinds of information you'll be gathering and creating for your project as well as how you're likely to use Google Drive as a group. You are likely to have:

  1. Research notes (such as the worksheet we're using in class today)
  2. Assignment documents (with multiple writers and editors)
  3. Citations and references
  4. Data (collected during your experiment)
  5. What else?

Backup plans

You need a back up plan! You do not want to lose files and work if your computer crashes. Consider uploading backups of your files to cloud-based services like CyBox on a regular basis or doing all of your work in Google Drive, which is cloud based and auto-saves.

Questions to Ask

Before you save a file or share a reference with your group, it's a good idea to make sure it might actually be useful. That way, you won't end up with folders full of identical-seeming PDFs that you have to analyze and evaluate later, when time is at even more of a premium.Considering answering the following questions for each source of information you use:

  • What did you read?
  • Who created it?
  • Why do you think it is credible?
  • Why is it valuable for the project?
  • How can you use the information it in your project?
  • Should your team members read it?
  • Does it raise important questions to ask your instructor?
  • Does it identify a need for more reading materials?

This list was adopted from Integrating Information into the Engineering Design Process, by Jim Clarke.

You might even want to think about including this information in the form of comments on files uploaded to a shared group folder, or notes attached to citations in a group library in a citation manager.

Your Librarian

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Heather Lewin
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Contact:
150 Parks Library
(515) 294.1004