Effective Hardware Maintenance and Inventory Logging?

Big_All asks: "I work in a planetarium theater, but I have a problem keeping effective maintenance logs. Paper works well enough but it's a little hard to do a query on inventory usage. What do you /.ers out there who maintain a vast array of expensive toys use to keep track of everything you've done? Perhaps something that is in development that shows promise - Palm/PDA plugability would be a definite bonus."