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gneissisnice wrote:I never did like guide books.
It's a lot of wasted space, with specimens you dont need to know, the pictures arent always helpful, and they often dont have all the info you might need.
I always find it better to make your own, because you know what you need in there, and you learn a lot just from making it.

Yeah, binders are more useful than guidebooks. If your binder is larger than about 2 inches, though, that means it's cluttered full of notes you don't need.

Often you only have time to look up 1 or 2 questions per station in your binder so you really should have most of it committed to memory. Also, you should be able to ID everything without guidebooks or binders.

yeah...id-ing i can do without my binder/fieldguide. only time i ever used them was when i needed to check up on the provenance of something...

gneissisnice wrote:Im pretty sure anything can be in your binder as long as it's hole-punched and in the binder.

I'm pretty sure they discourage the addition of old tests. It's under the spirit of the competition clause I believe.

E Edgar wrote:

gneissisnice wrote:I never did like guide books.
It's a lot of wasted space, with specimens you dont need to know, the pictures arent always helpful, and they often dont have all the info you might need.
I always find it better to make your own, because you know what you need in there, and you learn a lot just from making it.

Yeah, binders are more useful than guidebooks. If your binder is larger than about 2 inches, though, that means it's cluttered full of notes you don't need.

I really must disagree. We have used almost every page of our binder in competition at some time or another and it fills up (and has damaged to the point of a new binder being needed) an entire 3" binder. You can easily have a full page of well organized information for every taxon, or even two for some of the more charismatic vertebrates (simply because there is more information widely accessible). Then there are diagrams, so tack on about a page for every 5 or so taxon on the list. Other things to like general information on dating, history, etc. All this can take space. Will you use in any given competition all of the information on each page (or even all the information on any single page)? No. But on a difficult test you'll be glad that you have the extra information for when you do need it.

Also, sheet protectors are great (and this of course contributes to a good amount of a binders size). If we didn't have them we would constantly be replacing torn pages.

I have however seen full 5" binders in some events before (Possibly two, at least one without sheet protectors). Personally I could never imagine being able to use such a thing and find information. However, I also know that the people I am thinking of got 2nd in that event in nationals that year (it isn't me), so clearly they were able to use it well enough.

A good guideline for binder size is that it may be too small if you are finding that you don't have information for a lot of questions, and that it is too big if you are missing (or timing out) on questions that the answers to are in your binder.

Deeisenberg wrote: You can easily have a full page of well organized information for every taxon, or even two for some of the more charismatic vertebrates (simply because there is more information widely accessible). Then there are diagrams, so tack on about a page for every 5 or so taxon on the list. Other things to like general information on dating, history, etc.

So we have:
maybe 100 pages for all the information on each genus/family/order/class
20 diagram pages
30 general info pages? (perhaps an overestimate?)
=150 pages

If you print front and back, that is 75 sheets of paper.

Now, sheet protectors add a lot of space but that is "artificial space": you are not going to find 30 sheet protector pages harder to navigate than 30 non-protected pages (in fact, the opposite is true).

Therefore, even by your own admittance, you do not have a 3 inch binder worth of information. Rather, you have about 1.5 inches that looks like 3 because of the sheet protectors.

Incidentally, my binder is roughly this length as well.

Maybe we are in fact in agreement but you are counting sheet protector thickness and so are getting a different overall size.

E Edgar wrote:

Deeisenberg wrote: You can easily have a full page of well organized information for every taxon, or even two for some of the more charismatic vertebrates (simply because there is more information widely accessible). Then there are diagrams, so tack on about a page for every 5 or so taxon on the list. Other things to like general information on dating, history, etc.

So we have:
maybe 100 pages for all the information on each genus/family/order/class
20 diagram pages
30 general info pages? (perhaps an overestimate?)
=150 pages

If you print front and back, that is 75 sheets of paper.

Now, sheet protectors add a lot of space but that is "artificial space": you are not going to find 30 sheet protector pages harder to navigate than 30 non-protected pages (in fact, the opposite is true).

Therefore, even by your own admittance, you do not have a 3 inch binder worth of information. Rather, you have about 1.5 inches that looks like 3 because of the sheet protectors.

Incidentally, my binder is roughly this length as well.

Maybe we are in fact in agreement but you are counting sheet protector thickness and so are getting a different overall size.

Why wouldn't you consider sheet protectors a legitimate use of space? Pages can be easily torn, I prove that every day I open my calc binder...
In any case, it sounds like you're arguing to make De's binder seem smaller which is...not necessary? Size doesn't matter when it's all about page protectors...

jazzy009 wrote:
Why wouldn't you consider sheet protectors a legitimate use of space? Pages can be easily torn, I prove that every day I open my calc binder...
In any case, it sounds like you're arguing to make De's binder seem smaller which is...not necessary? Size doesn't matter when it's all about page protectors...

Agreed. But in my original post I said that if your binder is more than 2 inches, it is probably cluttered with notes that you don't need. As I think we all agree, sheet protectors do not contribute to clutter and are not notes. Therefore, although they take up space, they don't carry the negative effects (clutter) that notes have and so should not be considered in determining the maximum size a binder should be.

E Edgar wrote:
Agreed. But in my original post I said that if your binder is more than 2 inches, it is probably cluttered with notes that you don't need. As I think we all agree, sheet protectors do not contribute to clutter and are not notes. Therefore, although they take up space, they don't carry the negative effects (clutter) that notes have and so should not be considered in determining the maximum size a binder should be.

Meh...I suppose. I guess I think of it as a difference between "binder size" and "amount of notes"

hey, i know you all said that field guides were pointless and a waste of space, but which field guides do you guys use/take with you? thanks!

I've been using the smithsonian and the golden guide (pocket). Neither are really great, though...I wouldn't recommend them.