The conventional procedure of recording observations on paper, distilling the results into a manuscript for publication, and discarding the unused information, was appropriate for the pre-computer environment, but now merits some reconsideration.
It is highly desirable that as many of the observations as practicable should be recorded in an electronic spreadsheet or database, in order that they (including data not incorporated in the eventual publication) may be readily accessible later. If this is to be effective over the long term, some thought needs to be given to the inevitable obsolescence of contemporary hardware and software, discussed in the section on Archiving.
An additional, more radical possibility is suggested by the increasing capacity of computer storage available, and effective retrieval software. How often have we all come across a distinctive fossil, and vaguely remembered that we had seen it somewhere before, but are not able to remember where? It would now be a rather simple matter to store an image of any such fossil seen "out of the corner of our eyes", to tag it with locality data and a few morphologic descriptors, and retrieve the record when we come across a similar form years later.