I keep a thorough laboratory notebook. What is the relevance of any new recording scheme?
If you find your laboratory notebook scheme works fine for you then there is no reason to change it, though do check that it is rigorous. However, it is becoming very difficult to avoid having to make unambiguous reference to data that is in digital form. Examples are the outputs from analytical machinery, reports written using word processors, computer programs etc. At the very least, use of the hashing technique and recording the results in the laboratory notebook is a valuable intermediate recording technique. However, do make sure that the original data is kept intact otherwise the scheme does not work. CDROM is a very compact, accessible and cheap way of keeping such data nowadays.
