I’ve experimented over many years with electronic logbooks. I got tired of literally cutting and pasting print-outs of plots into paper logbooks, swollen by glue and pictures, back in 2001. Since then, I’ve experimented with a number of different electronic logbook technologies. It’s important to me that they can be backed up, and that data is easily retrieved from them. I here report what I’ve used, what I’ve liked, and what I’ve not liked.
ELOG: (https://midas.psi.ch/elog/) This is the Swiss Army knife of open-source, free logbooks. It can run locally, or on a server at home or work. It can be used for personal logs, or for collaboration. I’ve used it both ways. When I was at MIT, I used it to organize analysis between collaborators at MIT and SLAC. It can send e-mails when there are new entries, or updates to old ones. It allows HTML or plain text entries, embedded graphics or attached graphics. One of the coolest features, I think, is that it will take an attached multi-page PDF file and render the pages as individual graphics in the logbook entry. This lets you read a PDF file without opening it. I recommend this to people who need to collaborate, and for personal use for people who like a beefy logbook.
Xournal: (http://xournal.sourceforge.net/) Also open-source and free, this is good for the tablet PC crowd. You can handwrite entries, load graphics as backgrounds and mark them up (great for editing PDF files!). It combined old-school hand-writing with new-school electronic record-keeping. I’ve even considered writing slides in this, getting back to the old overhead projector days of giving seminars or talks. What’s held me back from doing so is that you can’t place graphics arbitrarily on a page. That prevents me from using it for talks, and from using it as a serious logbook. A big drawback is the access to data in text form in the document – hand-written logbooks can’t just be cut-and-pasted into e-mails, or the web. But it has lots of potential, and is definitely worth watching.
Tiddlywiki: (http://www.tiddlywiki.com/) For the wiki, stream-of-consciousness crowd, this is the way to go. I’ve actually switched from ELOG to Tiddlywiki for my logbook very recently, thanks to a rediscovery of this prompted by a student. It supports the creations of “tiddlers”, units of self-contained information that can be linked to, or can link to, other tiddlers. It also supports “journal entries”, which are tiddlers whose name (and thus hyperlink) are based on the current calendar date, with one entry per day. You can embed graphics, store the whole thing in CVS and sync it (or use rsync to back it up), and best of all you can edit it straight through the web browser. Since I use Zotero for storing papers, and a lot of physics information is stored on the web, it’s great to have an all-in-one place to do my note-taking. Tiddlywiki, and variants on it, have become my go-to way of rapidly developing documentation or a logbook.
Hope this opens some doors for you!
