Re: Monitoring user working hours in microscopy core facility

Posted by Thomas Horn on
URL: http://confocal-microscopy-list.275.s1.nabble.com/Monitoring-user-working-hours-in-microscopy-core-facility-tp7588749p7588787.html

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Dear Hanna,
We are using the free lab resource management system IRIS since several years now and we are very happy with it. We manage about 50 instruments/resources in our two facilities with IRIS.  It has all the features that a facility needs for allowing users to make reservations and keeping tight control on the usage of the instruments. It has extensive statistics features that allows you to extract all the numbers you need (grouped by users, groups, projects etc.), shows graphs on the statistics and allows to export the numbers. Moreover, we can also monitor the exact usage i.e. if the reservation-holding user started to use the machine in time or if he/she went over the time. Also, you can enforce rules such as "not more than 30% of total time/month can be reserved by one group" etc. There is a ton of communication features: request for training, mailing lists for notifications, subscription to resources to get notified when a slot frees up and more. We even manage the control of the biosafety regulations by having in IRIS approval procedures in place that involve the biosafety officers of the groups to assure we really know what the users bring into the facility and that it is used at the instruments designed to handle those organisms. Maybe it is worth for you to have a look at IRIS. Here is the link: https://iris.science-it.ch
The people who created IRIS are working at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel (Contact: Dean Flanders). They were very responsive to feature requests and we were able to shape IRIS quite a lot to fit our needs.

Best regards,
Thomas

Dr. Thomas Horn,
Head of the Single Cell Facility<https://www.bsse.ethz.ch/scf> and
Laboratory Automation Facility<https://www.bsse.ethz.ch/laf>
Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE)
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH)
Mattenstrasse 26, U1.46
CH 4058 Basel
Switzerland