Microscopy Home PageMost of the sites I've looked at (and not microscopy sites alone) describe a place, a person, a laboratory, some equipment and so forth. There's nothing wrong with this, we need descriptive sites like this, but it's time for the Web to develop in other ways too.
I propose that we create an online Microscopy Laboratory Manual, written by everyone and used by everyone. Such a manual would have many advantages and few drawbacks. This article sets out some ideas for discussion, please read it and send me your comments. I might publish the comments for further discussion, so don't mail me unless you're happy for the world to see what you've written.
Clearly, a manual consists mainly of methods, recipes and protocols for all the standard tasks needed in a typical laboratory. Everything from how to set up bright-field Kohler illumination or adjusting and aligning an SEM column, to making up haematoxylin/eosin or preparing lead citrate. Huge numbers of methods and variations are in use.
A manual should be clearly written and easy to follow. It should be comprehensive in its coverage and up-to-date, with a good index. It should be free from restrictive copyright clauses and easy to annotate whenever users wish.
Above all, a manual must be trustworthy and authoritative. Nobody is an expert in everything, so manuals are best written by many specialist contributors. All the methods should be presented in a standard style, however, so that users will become familiar with the layout.
Multiple authors could contribute to a central store of methods, and relevant entries could be found easily by title or keyword searches direct from the keyboard.
It would be possible for everyone who wished to contribute a method simply to publish it on a Web server somewhere and then notify a central index site where links to the pages would be stored.
This would have several drawbacks. No two methods would be presented in the same way, so the manual would be cumbersome to use. Access speeds would be patchy, pages stored at nearby sites would be retrieved quickly, those from another continent might be very slow. Many microscopists have access to e-mail and a Web browser, even if it's only Lynx. But far fewer have access to a Web server (and HTML skills) and many would not be able to contribute.
A better approach would be for authors to abide by agreed conventions of layout and content, submitting methods to a central site for editing and release. Items would be submitted as ASCII text and the HTML codes added by the editor. This site should then be mirrored wherever necessary to provide good access speeds to all users. Anyone with e-mail could contribute.
The editor would provide a contents list and index by which methods pages could be found. Relative links would be used throughout so that the entire manual would be easy to mirror, the copyright provision would expressly allow this.
Authors would agree to a copyright declaration modelled on the GNU text for software. This would ensure that the pages could be freely copied and reproduced by anyone. Copyright would be held by the individual authors, not by the Web site owner or by the editor.
Authors would further declare that their contributions do not contravene prior copyright held by others. The text would be original, expressed in their own words. I don't mean that a method published elsewhere could not be used, just that it must be rewritten, not merely copied.
We will also need to consider the safety implications. What happens if someone follows one of the protocols and suffers accidental equipment damage or injury? Some sort of clause will be needed to cover this, I've provided a draft safety disclaimer, would anyone care to comment? Maybe there's no need for a safety disclaimer, after all we don't provide one when we submit a paper for publication, even though we may describe the use of dangerous or poisonous materials.
Take a look at them, print them out, see how they'd feel if they were protocols you wanted to use in your own lab. Let me have some feedback, better still send me a few more methods using the draft online instructions, I'll publish them here for further consideration.
Perhaps we could get a discussion going on one of the mailing lists or Newsgroups, the Microscopy list (microscopy@sparc5.microscopy.com) or Microscopy Newsgroup (sci.techniques.microscopy) might be the most appropriate. I usually monitor both of these.
If there's sufficient interest and enthusiasm I'll modify this issue of In-Focus from time to time so that it reflects the views and ideas you send in. Maybe we can get this thing off the ground, I'm convinced it would be a great benefit to everyone.