Research log proposal

[Laurence Rowe]

Hi Martin,

I'd ask on the plone-users list, it's got much higher traffic.

Have you seen CMFBibliographyAT and it's accompanying products (search 
for bibliography on plone.org)

http://plone.org/products/cmfbibliographyat

Hope that helps,

Laurence

Martin Gustafsson wrote:
> Hello everybody,
> 
> I would like to suggest a project that could be useful to a lot of 
> people, in a context that's a bit off from what web CMS:es usually are 
> for. I wasn't sure where to put a proposal like this, but since the 
> product is intended primarily for university employees, I figured this 
> is the most suitable of the Plone lists. If you think otherwise, please 
> let me know.
> 
> What I have in mind is a Plone-based system for keeping scientific 
> notes. As a scientist, you need to keep a detailed log of what you do, 
> of the data you collect and the pictures you take. Today, everybody does 
> this on paper, simply because there is no good digital solution. Paper 
> logbooks are hard to search, you must keep several in parallell or 
> remember to always take one with you if you work in several labs, and 
> you can't easily go back and comment or modify previous notes. 
> Additionally, almost all measurement data is taken by computers these 
> days and pictures are taken digitally. Having pictures, data and notes 
> all in one place, searchable and categorizable, would be tremendously 
> useful. I have told some colleagues about the idea of setting up a 
> web-based note taking system, and they've all been very interested. If 
> nicely executed, a system like this could be adopted pretty widely, and 
> I think Plone would be an excellent platform to do it.
> 
> The general characteristics of such a system would be:
> 1) Fast adding and editing of content. A lab journal is more for writing 
> than for reading, as opposed to an intranet or a regular website. The 
> number of clicks required should be minimized, and this area that might 
> require some special adjustments.
> 2) Views that show the full text of each note in a folder, filtered by 
> keywords and dates.
> 3) Pre-defined Marshalling so that files can be uploaded in batch and 
> notes/data files be appended programmatically.
> 4) Simple installation and most special features removed. No workflow, 
> events, news etc; everything set up for one-person use.
> 
> I have a pretty good idea of what this should look like, and nearly all 
> the important parts can be done in Plone. The problem is, I don't have 
> the skills to do it by myself without somebody more experienced helping 
> me out. How do you suggest that I turn this into a real project and get 
> others to join me and help out with the coding?
> 
> If anyone here is interested, I would be happy to post a more technical 
> proposal, describing how I think this should be implemented. And again, 
> if you know of a better place to post it than here, that would be highly 
> appreciated too.
> 
> 
> Best regards
> Martin Gustafsson