CUCC Expedition Handbook - New survey wallet

Creating a new survey wallet

Great, I have discovered a new cave...

If you have not come to this page from Starting a New Cave" then go and read that first.

This page outlines step 2 of the survey production process. Each step is documented separately.
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7

Process

Starting a new wallet

Put all your written notes into the next empty "wallet": (a transparent folder/envelope, also sometimes known as a "pocket") in this year's lever-arch file (the "wallet binder") labelled e.g. "Expo Survey 2018" in the potato hut*.
The wallet has a paper sticky label on it with the wallet-identifier, e.g. 2018#22, already printed on the label.
Write the date and the names of the people on the trip on the label.
Tick whether your trip was a surface or a cave trip.
Write the name of the cave (with number if you know it), e.g. "264 Balkon"
Write the area in the cave you did your surveying, e.g. "mongol rally"
Now turn to the index sheets at the front of the folder, and fill in the line (e.g. 2018#22) for your wallet
- "264 mongol rally"
- date of trip
- people who were on it
- then there are a lot of tick boxes. The explanations for these will come later.
Image of wallet index sheet - click for larger image
Now, if you have not done it immediately after you left the cave, photograph all the pages of survey notes with your phone. Get one or more of the people also on the trip to do this too.

* As people spend longer and longer at top camp, we may establish a wallet file at top camp too, with pre-allocated numbers.

The original notes and sketches should be filed in the clearly marked wallet. Rip them out of the notebook, don't take them caving again and don't leave them lying around to be "Gössered"!

The notes (all of them, including dates, personnel, calibration, LRUD, station details, etc.) should be filed away in the wallet in the current year's surveys file. You should include a transcription on a sheet of paper if they are illegible (to other people; if you can't read them yourself, go back and do the survey again!). Even if you do this, never throw away the original notes.

Check existing online wallets (surveyscans folders)

As well as looking through the other plastic wallets in this year's lever-arch binder, have a look online at the list of all online wallets and have a look at all the folders referred to in your cave in, e.g. here is the data for cave 204: the wallet identifier is in the right-most column titles "Scans". If you are doing an entirely new cave, then this won't exist yet but it will be where your new discovery is eventually published.

As well as following through the links on those pages, have a look at the drawings files page which lists all the scanned notes, plan and elevation scans in the each wallet ("Scans folder" column).

Scan the notes into the online wallet

Each wallet has a corresponding folder in the online system where a record is kept of what information is in the wallet and where the corresponding survey data is filed:

/expofiles/surveyscans/2018/2018#22/

This is where the scanned (or photographed) copies of the survey notes are kept.

To use the scanner attached to the expo laptop, select the "Simple Scan" icon from the vertical menu of icons which you get by clicking on "Activities" in the top lefthand corner of the screen.

[ Normal people should skip this,
but nerds need to look here for the online wallet maintenance process ].

If your initial backup photos of your notes were poor quality, use the scanner in the potato hut to make better copies. Scan to JPEG format as .jpg files.

Name the scanned pages "notes-1.jpg, or notes-cavepassagename.jpg" etc. This is important as a script detects whether these files exist (with names beginning "notes..", "plan.." and "elev..") and if you name them something else it will hassle you unnecessarily.

[ Note to maintainers: do not rename these files even if they have been created with the wrong names. They are permanently referred to by the tunnel/therion/troggle system !]

Scanned survey notes are voluminous and so are not kept in the version control system. Instead it is all kept in the file bucket "expofiles" on the expo server in Cambridge.

You will be using the expo laptop to do the scanning and you will put all the scan files in the folder for your wallet, e.g. for 2018#19 it is:

/home/expo/expofiles/surveyscans/2018/2018#19/

and tell someone nerdy when you have finished and they will ensure that it is copied to the expo server.


If you want to do this yourself on your own laptop then be aware that
since 2018 this is all  more involved because of the enforced security on our new server. First you need a minimal laptop setup and then you will need to 
learn how to use Filezilla
- as documented for uploading your expo photographs. The correct folder
on the expo server is the same as that on the expo laptop- because we set up the expo laptop to be like that.
But only copy files to the server that you created yourself and which live in your own wallet folder

Storing your electronic survey .topo files

If you used a PDA instead of making notes on paper, you need to store your .topo files in the right place.

If you using the expo laptop you can put the .topo files in a special "X" folder for your virtual wallet, as there is no physical wallet, e.g. for 2018#X16 it would be:

/home/expo/expofiles/surveyscans/2018/2018#X16/

and tell someone nerdy when you have finished and they will ensure that it is copied from the expo laptop to the expo server.

If you are not in the potato hut then email all the .topo files to a friendly nerd (not necessarily on expo) who will upload them in the right place.

Back to the previous page in this sequence Creating a new cave in the online system.
Now go the the next page in this sequence Starting a new survex file".