Abstract
Managing capital equipment in research laboratories is among the most challenging tasks core facilities face, requiring an intricate interplay among division and personnel to oversee a complex informational matrix. Numerous factors can contribute to equipment challenges, but leading the list is the fact of fragmented management practices, like depend on multiple individuals tracking information captured in separate databases, spreadsheets, and on paper, most of the times not well correlated nor updated. Not only oversight administrators, but also researchers, technicians, students and new hires, do not have a cohesive view of their equipment infrastructure, much less their entire equipment diversity, and related safety and compliance information. It is necessary to track not only all procurement-related information, current location, usage, calibration and maintenance information, but also user manuals, standard operating procedures, safety regulations, training or even to link to a calendar reservation system. Here we present an open source platform, called Research Equipment Database (RED), capable of centralizing all aspects of equipment information management, providing a common place where administrative and research personnel use and share all the information related to the equipment. Streamlined access, through a web interface, facilitates higher productivity throughout the institution, helps to protect equipment investments and shields both, the equipment itself and researchers from risk, ensuring that equipment is operated safely, and maximizing productivity. This joint management and display of technical and administrative information, significantly improved the productive time of the devices, as a consequence of well informed users, smarter routine maintenance procedures, and finally more effective instrumentation purchasing decisions.