I saw a pointer to this reddit post with the provocative title “Org mode appearing into the wild…” Naturally, I had to follow the link to see what it was about. It turns out to refer to a Science article entitled How to keep a lab notebook. It’s mostly advice to researchers in the laboratory sciences and comprises short descriptions from many researchers on various aspects of keeping a laboratory notebook.
Other than universal agreement that it’s a necessary part of doing research, there’s a significant amount of disagreement on the best way of doing things. A surprising number of researchers prefer keeping their notebooks on paper. Some of that is no doubt driven by long standing protocols involving the protection of intellectual property but some researchers said they just liked it better.
Many of the researchers preferred a digital notebook citing advantages such as searchability and backups. One even mentioned Org-mode as the ideal way of maintaining her lab notebook saying that Org makes it easy to include a scan of handwritten notes, equations, bibliographies, tables, and even code. That’s a sentiment that many Irreal readers will identify with even if they aren’t laboratory researchers.
Finally, some of the researchers used a hybrid system where they collected notes in a traditional paper notebook as they were performing their experiments but later either transcribed or scanned them into a digital notebook.
It may be that I’m just fascinated by such things but I found the article very informative and enjoyed reading about the various strategies that people used. It’s well worth a read if you have any interest in such things.