Gluing a photo into your lab notebook the wrong way doesn't count as evidence

Search "lab notebook photo attachment" and you'll often land on a single fragment of advice — "glue it down with permanent adhesive" — and nothing else. The questions that actually come up in practice start after that: who signs under the photo, how do you keep several photos in order, and does this whole procedure disappear once you're using an electronic notebook instead of paper. Photos, instrument printouts, and copies of results from another lab — anything you can't write directly into the notebook by hand — get their own treatment in Korea's National R&D Research Note Guideline, separate from ordinary entries. Here we go through both the paper and electronic cases.

Why photos are treated differently from regular entries

A lab notebook's evidentiary value comes from being able to show that who wrote what, and when, hasn't been altered after the fact. Handwriting can be checked to some degree against pen strokes and ink, but a photo or an instrument printout is different — a single sheet of photo paper or thermal paper could, in principle, be swapped for one shot or printed on a different date at any time. That's why the guideline classifies this kind of material as a separate "attachment" category that can't be entered directly into the body text, and requires a signature and date on the act of attaching it — not just on the material itself. The point isn't "glue it and you're done" — it's "prove the moment of attaching it, the same way you prove the moment of writing an entry."

Paper notebooks: how to attach photos and printouts

Several Korean university technology-transfer office manuals converge on the same procedure.

• Fix it in date order, with permanent adhesive — don't use tape or

sticky notes that can be peeled off and reattached.

• Sign and date across the boundary of the attachment — the signature

needs to cross from the photo onto the notebook page itself, so that later swapping out just the photo for a different one becomes evident.

• Don't cover the surrounding entry — the attachment shouldn't obscure

the page's original record, and nothing should get cut off when the page is copied. If there's no room, attach it to a blank page and reference its location from the body text.

• Number multiple attachments in sequence — something like "photo

1/3" lets a reviewer notice if one item goes missing or the order gets shuffled.

• Cross out any leftover blank space — draw a diagonal line through any

space left around the attachment so nothing can be inserted there later, marking clearly where the original record ends.

All five rules converge on one idea: proving that the attachment existed at that time, in that place — through the act of attaching it, not through the photo alone. It's the same principle covered in our post on correcting a lab notebook entry: leave a trace rather than erasing.

Electronic notebooks: "preserve," not "attach"

There's no physical paper to glue anything onto in an electronic notebook. What's required instead comes down to three things.

1. Keep the original file intact — don't crop or resize a photo before

adding it; keep the file your camera or instrument actually produced (JPG, CSV, an instrument-specific format, etc.) preserved separately, and name and locate that file explicitly in the body text.

1. Timestamp the attachment automatically, at the moment it happens —

this is the electronic equivalent of a paper notebook's signature-plus-date. If a person manually types in a date, backdating can't be ruled out.

1. Make any later change to the file verifiable — something like a

hash value should let you confirm the file's content hasn't changed since it was attached. This is the same tamper-evidence requirement covered in our post on what electronic notebooks actually require.

In short, where paper solves the problem by making it physically hard to detach something, electronic notebooks have to solve it by making any covert change leave a trace. Different mechanisms, same goal.

Paper vs. electronic: attachment handling side by side

Common mistakes in practice

• Attaching photos in a batch, later — if photo prints are put off and

a whole batch gets glued in at once, the gap between the shoot date and the attach date undermines credibility.

• Attaching without a signature — gluing something in without a

signature and date generally doesn't count as a proper attachment under the guideline.

• Keeping only a screen capture in an electronic notebook — without the

underlying original file, there's no way to later verify the capture against the source.

• Not naming the file or its location in the body text — the file

exists somewhere in the system, but with no reference to it anywhere in the entry, it becomes an orphaned piece of unindexed material.

Pre-attachment checklist

• Does the date you shot or received the photo/printout match the date

you're attaching it?

• (Paper) Did you sign and date across the boundary of the attachment?
• (Paper) Did you number it in sequence and place it without covering the

surrounding entry?

• (Electronic) Are you preserving the original file separately, not just a

screen capture?

• (Electronic) Is the attachment timestamp recorded automatically by the

system?

• Did you name the attached file and its location in the body text?

This is a synthesis of procedures several university manuals describe in common, so the exact requirements can vary by institution and project. Confirm the precise wording against the National R&D Research Note Guideline text and your own institution's technology-transfer office before relying on it.