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<h2 id="tophead">CUCC Expedition Handbook</h2>
<h1>Logbooks</h1>
<p>As soon as possible after a trip finishes, a <b>hand-written write-up</b> of the trip is made in the nearest logbook: 
the base camp logbook or the top camp logbook. 


<h3 id="why">Why the logbook is important</h3>

<p>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, pleasedo lots of sketches in the logbook.

<p>Always, always write the date, <em>your</em> 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.

<p>
<a href="/years/2018/logbook.html#t2018-08-03w"><img src="i/logbookpage.jpg" class="onright"></a>
If this is all new to you, please now read 
<a href="survey/why.htm"><strong>Why we make surveys</strong></a>
and
<a href="survey/datamgt.html">Cave data management</a>, 
and then the 
<a href="survey/index.htm">Survey Handbook</a>

<ul>
<li>Why the logbook is so important
<li><a href="#rig">Rigging guide</a>
<li><a href="#type">UK Caving Blog</a>
<li><a href="#form">Using the online form</a>
<br /><br />
<li><a href="computing/logbooks-parsing.html">Detailed Formatting</a> of a logbook entry (nerds only)
<li><a href="computing/logbooks-parsing.html">Re-importing</a> the logbook into troggle (nerds only)
</ul>

 
    <p>We now [September 2023] have an online form for uploading  logbook entries (text only, and HTML links to images) for the 2024 expo at <a href="/logbookedit/">/logbookedit/</a>.
    
<h3 id="rig">Initial rigging guide</h3>
<p>The logbook is also 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.
<p>Writing up this and the final rigging guide is an important part of the Expo cave exploration process and is documented in <a href="survey/newrig.html">a specific "rigging" section</a>  the survey handbook.



<h3 id="type">Typing your trip report - in the UK Caving Blog</h3>
<p>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 <a href="https://ukcaving.com/board/index.php?topic=25249.0">2019 Blog</a>. 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.
<p>The UK Caving blog is mobile-friendly and it is very easy to add photos. So if you discover an entrance with a distinctive look, then this is the easiest way to record it and upload the photos.

<h3 id="form">Typing your trip report - using the online form</h3>

<p>If you have online access, then the best way to type up the text for for logbook entry is using the <a href="/logbookedit/">online form</a> (you will need to log in using the usual cavey:beery password for user 'expo').
<p>This will present no problems for newcomers, but old hands may find it a bit perplexing as it <a href="computing/logbooks-format.html">seems</a> to be too simple.
<ul>
<li>Enter the date of the trip in ISO format, e.g. 2023-07-30 (year-month-day).
<li>Write in your name: you are the author of the piece. Use any of the <a href="/aliases/2023">troggle-recognised aliases</a> (which are specific to each expo). On the 2023 expo we had three people called 'Adam', but in other years the name 'Adam' would be unique.
<li>Then write in the name of everyone involved, whether or not they were actually going underground, e.g. "Ash, Mealy, Jono, Flo, Hagrid", with the names separated by commas.
<li>Then where it all happened. If you went caving at all, then use the cave name (Fishface) or cave id (1623-290) as this will be specially recognised and indexed.
<li>Then the title of what you did, e.g. " I drank Beer"
<li>Then the text of your logbook entry. This can be as short or as long as you like, and can contain HTML code if you like. Otherwise, just use a double newline to break paragraphs. (If you have scanned diagrams or photos then you will need to properly know how HTML works and need to contact a nerd to move the image files to the right place.)
<li>If anyone went underground, fill in the Time Underground field in decimal hours, e.g. '11.5' hours.
<li>Click the big button "Update Logbook Entry"
</ul>
<p>The page willl refresh and at the bottom will be a rendering of what your logbook entry looks like. Check through it for typos etc., make the changes in the form and click the big button again until you are happy with it.

<h3 id="type">Typing just your trip report (your phone or the <i>Expo Laptop</i>)</h3>
  
<p>These days, just write up your trip as a message on your phone and post it to the Matrix chat group 'expo' 
(<a href="https://app.element.io/#/room/#expo:matrix.org">app.element.io/#/room/#expo:matrix.org</a>), 
or email it to a nerd.

<p>Alternatively, if you are sitting at any internet-connected laptop, inlcuding the <em>expo laptop</em> in the potato hut, you can use the online form <a href="/logbookedit/">expo.survex.com/logbookedit/</a>.

 <h4>Why we type it</h4>
 
  <p>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. Scanning is not good enough yet to read handwriting or to interpret which scribble relates to which sketch.
<p>
Type the text, but still do lots of drawings in the paper logbook.
  <p>If you are typing more than a single paragraph, type it up in another app first, and copy and paste the text into the online form. After you have transferred and updated the text, check that it has actually all appeared in the logbook: <a href="https://expo.survex.com/logreport/2024">log report</a> and that the date and people are correct.
 
<!--
<ul>
<li>You will type your trip report as plain text using a text editor.
<li>You will be typing into a file called something like "logbook-mynewtrip.txt" in the folder "Downloads"
<li>You will be asking someone nerdy to take this trip report and to edit it into the proper place later.
</ul>

<p>The first challenge is to find how to start up the text editor. The <em>expo laptop</em> is running debian Linux. On the Desktop is an icon labelled "Text Editor": click on it. 

<p>If you are lucky this will bring up an empty window for a new file. 
<br />If you are unlucky it will bring up the previous person's file.
<p>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".
<p>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.
<p>Now type in your trip report using whatever format you like, but please leave a blank line between paragraphs.
-->

<h4 id="sketches">Adding the sketches</h4>
<p>During and after expo, the logbook is scanned and photographed (and the images stored permanently in e.g. <a href="/expofiles/writeups/2024/">/expofiles/writeups/2024/</a> ).
<p>Extracting the sketches and topos from the scanned whole pages is a fiddly job. If you have the paper logbook to hand, it is  easier for phone-centric people to selectively re-photograph just the sketch and edit it on your phone.
  <p>Unlike the Cave Description editor, we do not yet (in 2024) have a simple online system for adding images into the online page.
    <p>Upload the photos of the sketches, renamed with the filename including the date, e.g. 2024-07-23_topo359.jpg, using the <a href="/photoupload/2024/LogbookImages">Upload Photos</a> form into the "LogbookImages" folder.
      <p>If you know HTML, then you can create a link to that file directly. Otherwise a nerd will do it over winter 2024/25.

<h3 id="type">The online logbook file</h3>

<p>The contents of both the paper topcamp logbook (if it exists) and the basecamp paper 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 during and after expo. 

For more details of the mechanics see the <a href="computing/logbooks-format.html">Logbook internal format</a> documentation

<p>Recent logbooks:
<ul>
<li><a href="../years/2018/logbook.html">2018</a> - this is a particularly nice example with many rigging diagrams 
  <li><a href="/logreport/2018">2018 report</a> -  logbook contents list
<li><a href="../years/2017/logbook.html">2017</a>
</ul>

<p>The result is a webpage reporting who did what and what was done by whom on expo, 
e.g. see <a href="http://expo.survex.com/expedition/2018">the 2018 expo report</a>
and individual logbook entries on a specific date, such as the date of a survey or wallet, are now
listed below so that it is easier to find context which has been omitted from a survex file, e.g.
<a href="/survexfile/caves-1626/359/alpine_showers">Alpine Showers survex file</a> has a list below it 
of trips on that date, inlcuding the relevant 
<a href="/logbookentry/2023-07-14/2023-07-14b">logbook trip report</a>.


<h4>Editing logbooks</h4>
<p>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 "<a href="computing/logbooks-parsing.html">
Importing</a>" 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.
<p>It is not robust because it all depends on a rather hairy regex - all in one expression - which is of course very bad practice.

<hr />
Go on to <a href="computing/logbooks-format.html">Logbook internal format</a> documentation.<br />
Go on to <a href="computing/logbooks-parsing.html">Importing logbooks into troggle</a>.<br />
Go on to <a href="computing/log-blog-parsing.html">Importing the online UK Caving blog into troggle</a>.
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