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Essential fieldnote components

There are many essential elements of field notes in addition to establishing control. Important components that Adams, Swingley, and
Fedor mentioned include the following:
● Date
● Team members present
● Weather conditions
● Equipment used
● File naming conventions
● Control used
● Location of first control point
● Rod heights
● Base height and location
● Level information (benchmark location, type, method)
● North arrow
● Relevant drawings
● Relevant variables impacting the site or crew

“One of my pet peeves was having a North arrow on every single page that has a sketch. I can’t
tell you how many times people start drawing things and whenever someone else looks at it,
North looks like the other way,” said Philip Adams.

He explained that it’s also important to give a correct sense of proportions. He recommended
that teams complete a practice exercise to ensure they have a method for getting it right.
“It’s very difficult when the drawings are substantially
out of proportion. You have a building five feet from a
property line, but it looks a hundred and comparison
to everything else. So the best way to teach these
guys how to do it is to have one guy on a crew go out
and draw it. And the other guy has to come into the
office and draft it. And they started understanding
what they need,” he said.

Electronic versus handwritten field notes

The question of the hour seems to be: how do you actually go about recording your field notes? Is it all
paper? All electronic? Something in between?

Valid arguments were made on both sides of the aisle, with the consensus being that a hybrid model
works best.

The case for electronic notes

Ryan Swingley was team electronic notes, citing the fact that you can easily save all notes to an
electronic file, timestamp sensitive documents and photos, and save everything safely in the cloud.

“I don’t want to say there’s little place for paper notes today, but I’m definitely very pro electronic
notes because electronic notes don’t lie, right?” Ryan said.

With the electronic data from his GPS Rover, he knows every second every shot was taken in
history, which is powerful information to have at your fingertips.

“I really liked the data integrity of electronic notes. And what I would say is when it comes to a
boundary perspective and a topographic perspective to me, I mean, you can add a written note to
any code or any shot. You can add attribution. You can take photos and attach them to points these
days. So from that perspective, I find that there’s little use of paper notes,” he added.
Ryan also made the point that paper notes are fragile. On one job site when he was in college, it

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