InfoGroupC

NOTES FOR GROUP C

Long Ye Leading

General Discussion

• There is a need for a 101 level of information on what you can and cannot obtain from SAS measurements. Also a crib sheet of dangers and common pitfalls and does and donts.
• There is also a need for training on experimental planning
• Conversely there is also a need for more in depth information. Most existing materials seem particularly good at getting one into scattering, often simplifying things, but not so good at really helping take a user to the next level.
• BIG QUESTION: How to get the information (new and existing) into the hands of new users? Where do they look?
  • Students learn from group and/or papers, but don’t usually have the background to judge if a paper is doing something dubious with the data.
    • education of reviewers might help? perhaps a crib sheet of major pitfalls to watch out for could be useful?
  • At the same time there is a large amount of information available., particularly from various scattering schools, facility sites, as well as Brian Pauw’s blog and videos etc. but over half the table didn’t know about it.
  • Possible approaches to dissemination:
    • Use Wikipedia
      • Pros: First thing that comes up on search, citable
      • Cons: May run into problem being too in depth, citation may not reflect state of text when it was cited
    • Use Github
      • Pros: Citable at the level of the version tag, can be as in depth as one likes
      • Cons: Not as simple for collaborative document editing as Wikipedia, not as obvious for software searches
    • Provide links in a Wikipedia article to the more in depth material on github or sasportal or wiki
      • See Kevin Yager's effort and his gisaxs.com wiki which users say is very helpful
• Can the limitations on what is acceptable analysis be built into the software itself? Can we put guarde fou
• At a minimum we should provide links to all existing tutorials materials
• A database or list of papers that provide good guidance would be nice
  • Brian Pauw has a curation of papers on SAS
• A Note about training materials: Different communities need to come at the information from different directions so that it is hard to have a one size fits all introductory manual.
• Would it be useful/possible to add a section on scattering fundamentals to the safety training required of all users coming to the beamline Alternatively how about a welcome package containing things like a 101 training, does and donts list and poster of resources?

Key thoughts going forward

• Make existing resources, in particular from scattering schools, more visible/accessble
• Poster of resources printed and posted - for example at beamlines
• Checklist for reduction and analysis