Choosing the right notebook for your scientific experiments can make all the difference in how you feel about your experiments and how enjoyable the experiments can be.  What you need in a lab notebook depends on the level you are working at, the environment that you will be working in, the convenience and ease of use of the notebook, and the cost.

What makes for a good lab notebook? 

A good notebook should have:

• Pages that don't come out, while spiral notebooks with perforated pages may seem like a good idea at first with a little use the pages will start to fall out and you will loose your notes.
•  A stiff cover, this will protect the notebook from heavy use and give you something to lean on when you are "in the field."
• A convenient size, if you are taking it with you on trips a smaller size will make the load light.  Remember you can always start a NEW notebook when your first one is full.

My suggestion is to buy one of those black and white (sometimes they are green and white) composition notebooks .  The pages are sewn together and they are bound with a stiff cover.  They are slightly smaller than a standard sheet of paper and they aren't too thick or heavy.  They are also pretty cheap, usually only $1 - $4. 

If you are lucky you may find composition notebooks that are "quad ruled".  These make EXCELLENT notebooks because they have "graph paper" inside.  This makes it easy to make tables, sketches and graphs in your notebook.  They usually don't cost any more than a standard composition notebook and can really give a young person a feeling that they are working with something special.

 There are a variety of specialty notebooks that are in use:

• If you know you will be in a lot of wet places, there are special notebooks that are used for wet environments.  Recently on Lifehacker Rite in the Rain notebooks were discussed .  They have pages that don't get saturated with water and you are less likely to loose all your notes.  They are more expensive, in the $20 range, but if you will be working in a wet environment all the time a notebook like these is probably your best bet.
• Professional Laboratory notebooks are used by scientists in corporate and university research laboratories.  They are usually hard bound books that have numbered pages, so that it is easy to tell if a page is missing (and you can make a table of contents for your notes).  Some even have duplicate pages with "carbon copies" for scientists that have to turn in a copy of their notes for safekeeping and for compliance with government regulations.  A quick search for notebooks like these turns up Eureka Lab Book and Scientific Notebook Company as a supplier and The Journal of Chemical Education has a short list of suppliers as part of their Chemical Education Resource Shelf.  These notebooks can range anywhere from $10 to $40, but can make a wonderful and exciting gift to an advancing scientist. If you think you might have something Patentable (we will discuss this later on) you need to be using a professional quality bound notebook.

Depending on your budget, what you plan to use it for and where you plan to use it most there are a variety of notebooks available for your needs.  Keeping a laboratory notebook is an important part of learning to be a good scientist, without good records to turn to from our experiments we would never have a record of what we learned.

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