Re: [gentoo-science] elektronic lab book

[Markus Luisser]

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
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