Hi Norman!
I am having my eyes open for an electronic way of keeping a lab book for my experiments for quite some time now, however to my surprise, it seems there is none open source. I am wondering how people in the science herd are organizing their day by day experiments.
I have to admit that similar to Oliver and Markus I use mostly text files and plain old paper to keep track of my activities. On the computer I use a combination of plain text files, LaTeX files, data files and a proper directory structure, backed by a subversion repository which I found immensely useful for working at different computers and to keep track of my progress. My main reason to use LaTeX is simply that I'm lazy and dont want to type stuff twice, so when I want to publish, I simply combine what I already have. Together with subversion (and probably viewcv) this gives a nice system that is quite painless to keep track of stuff, plus you always have a backup somewhere. I also found it very helpful at times to be able to work with my documents on different operating systems and text files are very difficult to beat in the interoperability area ;) I also experimented with wikis some time ago and found them quite useful but ditched them in the end because the overhead was too large for what I needed. But it could be that its just the right stuff for you. Good luck! markus -- [email protected] mailing list
