Notebooks

I like proper notebooks to store my stuff in.  In grad school, I used these:

$1.50ish. The ACCO ones are probably the best quality.

You triple whole punch your looseleaf pages (or the occasional journal article you printed out), and use the flappy steel retaining bar to hold it closed.  The nice thing about this is that when you complete the project, you can use these screw posts (someplaces apparently call them "Chicago posts"):

Only sold in insane quantities.

Basically, you use these when you're done, and are them left with a notebook comprised of looseleaf pages that is easily bound and able to live on a bookshelf without trouble.

However, after spending a month visiting another institution, I switched over to these books:

Like $8.

Pre-bound, wonderful grade paper, far easier to carry while walking than the five pound 600 page tomes I'd been making up to that point.  Smaller, and I waste a lot of space, as I only write on the right sheets.  The left sheets are there for indexing, quick notes and calculations, and thumbnail diagrams.  It's kind of a modified Cornell notes system that I use.  I skip the summary section, but noting keywords makes things far easier to find.