Here's how we (Hongmeigui CES) organise our notes. So far we've surveyed over 185km in China, so we've got reams and reams of survey notes and have gradually come up with a system for organising them.
The scans of our survey notes are a bit large, so rather than including them as inline images, I've linked to them.
Every survey has a
cover sheet.
This identifies which cave the survey is in, who did the survey and what tasks they performed, and which instuments were used. Any calibration data is recorded here. We give each cave a unique number as chinese farmers aren't always very original when naming the caves near their fields, with 'Big Cave' and 'Bottomless Pit' being fairly common names.
The cover sheet also helps protect the first page of 'real' notes from getting mucked up.
Notes
We've got some nice pre-printed waterproof survey paper which is loose-leaf so we can bind it into survey books for each trip and then file the notes away afterwards. If we're in a dry cave we often use ordinary paper. Usually we use interleaved notation for recording survey legs, as it's less writing and uses up less space on the page.
Sketch
Note the cave number and date at the top of the page. We write this on each sheet of paper to prevent them getting muddled up in our filing system. We've got a few thousand sheets of survey notes, so keeping things organised is very important.
We sketch to scale in the cave, which seems like a pain in the backside at first but soon becomes second nature. It saves a lot of time when drawing up the survey on the surface and makes it easier to spot things that have been recorded incorrectly - for example if a leg has been written down backwards it will usually be the right way round in the sketch, and the error can be corrected with a high level of confidence.
Each sketch has a north arrow and a scale bar to ensure that the sketch can be correctly interpreted later.
Elevation
Not much to say about this, but some people seem to routinely survey without drawing an elevation; often it's the most interesting bit as changes in passage height can be quite significant.
Duncan.