If this is all new to you, please now read
Why we make surveys
and
Cave data management,
and then the
Survey Handbook
As soon as possible after a trip finishes, a hand-written write-up of the trip is made in the nearest logbook: the base camp logbook or the top camp logbook.
The logbook writeup is the oldest and most basic way of recording your trip but it must not be neglected. This is also where you put your speculations and ideas for what looks promising and what is obvious but doesn't go: things that are vital to future expoers. And please, please do lots of sketches in the logbook.
Always, always write the date, your name and the names of other people involved at the top of each entry. If you mention a cave location, please also write down the cave name somewhere. In 10 years no-one will know where "Lemon Snout" is.
If this is all new to you, please now read
Why we make surveys
and
Cave data management,
and then the
Survey Handbook
The logbook is the place where we record the rigging of caves as we discover them. You will manually copy the notes you made underground into the logbook.
Writing up this and the final rigging guide is an important part of the Expo cave exploration process and is documented in a specific "rigging" section the survey handbook.
If you are at basecamp, then it is an excellent idea to type the text of your logbook trip report instead of writing it by hand - see below. But still do lots of drawings in the paper logbook.
If you are up on the plateau, just write it up on your phone. OK you can't sketch diagrams really, but you can include photos easily. Just do it as an email or a photo.
We now [September 2023] have an online form for uploading logbook entries (text only, and HTML links to images) for the 2024 expo at /logbookedit/.
In recent years we have seen an admirable increase in the number of people writing up their trips and experiences on social media and in particular on the UK Caving blog, see 2019 Blog. But please, please also make a handwritten entry in the logbook saying you have done this so that the text and pictures can be transcribed later. It is too easy to lose these: in 2018 there were two blogs in operation and most people didn't know that.
If you have online access, then the best way to type up the text for for logbook entry is using the online form (you will need to log in using the usual cavey:beery password for user 'expo').
This will present no problems for newcomers, but old hands may find it a bit perplexing as it seems to be too simple.
As handwriting can be very bad, please try to type the text, print it and stick it in the logbook, adding any sketches by hand. This will save someone (probably you) deciphering your handwriting and typing it up later.
These days, just write up your trip as a message on your phone and post it to the Matrix chat group 'expo' (app.element.io/#/room/#expo:matrix.org), or email it to a nerd.
Alternatively, if you are sitting at the expo laptop and that someone who knows the password has logged in for you (as user "expo"), and (b) that you know nothing about the software systems used by expo.
The first challenge is to find how to start up the text editor. The expo laptop is running debian Linux. On the Desktop is an icon labelled "Text Editor": click on it.
If you are lucky this will bring up an empty window for a new file.
If you are unlucky it will bring up the previous person's file.
If it is a new file, save it to the Downloads folder (/home/expo/Downloads) using the "File->Save" menu item and give it a sensible name such as "logbook-mynewtrip.txt".
If it was someone else's file, save it using the "File->Save" menu. Then close the text editor ("File->Close"). Then start it up again from the vertical icon menu as before.
Now type in your trip report using whatever format you like, but please leave a blank line between paragraphs.
The contents of both the topcamp logbook and the basecamp logbook are typed into the same "logbook.html" file for future use in tracking down leads and surveys. The drawings are scanned and stored in the same place, and hand-edited into the logbook.html file after expo finished. The typed notes are uploaded into the expo server database and correlated with survey data done on the same day or by the same people.
Recent logbooks:
All these scanned handwritten logbook entries are typed into a laptop (often the expo laptop) which is then synchronised the version control system.
The result is a webpage reporting who did what and what was done by whom on expo, e.g. see the 2018 expo report.
If you are using the expo laptop just edit this file (if you are on expo in 2025):
/home/expo/expoweb/years/2025/logbook.html
copy the format you can see other people have used; tell a nerd that you have done this
so that they can take care of synchronising it with the version control system.
DO NOT take a copy of the logbook.html file from the expo laptop, copy it by email or USB stick to another laptop, edit it there and then copy it back. That will delete other people's work.
If you are using your own laptop then you will need to either:
Logbooks are typed up and kept in the [expoweb]/years/[nnnn]/ directory as 'logbook.html'.
Rather than editing logbook.html when you type up your trip, it is a much better idea to type up just your trip(s) in a separate file, e.g. "logbook-mynewtrip.txt", and email it to a nerd if you are sitting at a different laptop.
Do whatever you like to try and represent the logbook in html but do keep is simple. Don't try any clever HTML stuff. See the "Edit this Page" instructions for how to insert images and figures.
When writing logbook entries, just use relative URLs to the same folder as your text, e.g. href="mynicepic.jpg" and the image and the logbook HTML will, for a 2017 expo, be put into /years/2017/.
One special suggestion: do not use <P> paragraph tags. Well, you can if you like, but they will be stripped out and replaced by double-newlines when the file is parsed. This is because <P> paragraph tags cannot be nested - that is not allowed in HTML - and the fragment you are writing will be merged with other fragments and may be put inside a higher-level paragraph. [This is also true for Cave Description text in "Edit this Cave".]
The only rigid structure is the markup to allow troggle to parse the logbook files into 'trips':
<hr />
<div class="tripdate" id="t2007-07-12B">2007-07-12</div>
<div class="trippeople"><u>Jenny Black</u>, Olly Betts</div>
<div class="triptitle">Top Camp - Setting up 76 bivi</div>
<div class="timeug">T/U 0.2 hrs</div>
Note: the ID's must be unique, so are generated from 't' plus the trip date plus a,b,c etc. when there is more than one trip on a day.
Note: T/U stands for "Time Underground" in decimal hours, e.g. "0.2" for 12 minutes (approx.) . We do not parse or collate this information currently.
Note: the <hr /> is significant and used in parsing, it is not just prettiness.
Note: follow this format exactly. No HTML comments or tabs or newlines.
Note this special format "Top Camp - " in the triptitle line:
<div class="triptitle">Top Camp - Setting up 76 bivi</div>
Note this special format "<u>Jenny Black</u>" in the trip-people line:
<div class="trippeople"><u>Jenny Black</u>, Olly Betts</div>
If you like, you can put non-expo people in the trip-people line: "*Ol's Mum" with a * prefix and they will be totally ignored by troggle:
<div class="trippeople"><u>Jenny Black</u>, Olly Betts, *Ol's Mum</div>
<div class="trippeople"><u>Jenny Black</u>, Olly Betts, *4 Hungarian Cavers</div>
Please do NOT use the "Edit this page" capability to edit previous logbooks [this has now, we hope, been disabled]. The HTML format is not robust enough (to be honest all this logbook stuff is a bit of a kludge). See the link above " Importing" as any mistake will crash the import parser. [ Historic logbooks should only be edited by an expert, and the import process should be tested offline before the edited logbook is uploaded to the server.
It is not robust because it all depends on a rather hairy regex - all in one expression - which is of course very bad practice.