We report on an in-progress project to design a new field instrument used to link data collection and preservation practices across the gaps separating groups of oceanographic scientists engaged in interdisciplinary collaborations. Oceanographic cruises provide an important means for collecting data as an input for specific scientific investigations and for longer term efforts to make a wide range of environmental field data available for future scientific investigators. For both of these tasks, there is the need to perform the invisible work of identifying and resolving potential gaps and consistency issues in the data in order to make the data usable. The event logger system was designed to address these issues by associating every measurement on two organization's scientific cruises with a latitude, longitude, and time stamp. It is the finding of this ethnographic analysis that the event logger system has been successful to the extent that the design process has been able to incorporate a diverse range of voices into an open and collaborative activity.