Publicizing Shared Instrumentation and Open Access Facilities

Amorette Getty, Materials Research Laboratories, UCSB

UC Santa Barbara has worked hard for many years to encourage an environment of interdisciplinary collaboration and resource-sharing within its research community. Many instruments in campus labs are available for shared use, or housed in open-access facilities with dedicated expert staffing. However, it is still difficult for new researchers on the campus to find out about the range of resources that are available to them. UCSB has recently launched a new website intended to help new researchers and the scientific community use the campus's significant investment in high-tech research instrumentation to maximum effect. It contains a searchable database listing every shared or open-access research instrument, laboratory, and facility on the UCSB campus. Users can search for instruments by type, and learn about the owner, location, and access procedures for both internal and external users.

Limited interdepartmental cooperation and awareness has often limited access and expertise among college researchers. Even within a department, knowledge on lab and equipment capabilities is not effectively shared outside of a research group. This often unintentional lack of cooperation leads to inefficient equipment and staff use, and reduced research capabilities.

At a larger scale, these problems occur among multi-university systems and consortia. The Materials Research Facilities Network (MRFN, www.MRFN.org), a 26-campus network funded by the National Science Foundation, developed a web database allowing users to browse and search 891 pieces of equipment across the consortium, and contact the owner to arrange research and commercial use. The drupal-based website was launched in 2012 after development at UCSB's Materials Research Laboratory (a MRFN member) and has seen regular use among the materials research community, as a portal for locating resources and comparing instrumentation suites between campuses.

While MRFN's Shared Equipment sire required considerable effort to bring to fruition, the code is fully reusable and easily adapted to new equipment sets. The MRFN.org site was forked and reskinned at a significantly decreased cost compared to developing such a website from the ground up. We will report on our efforts adapting the MRFN site to catalog research facilities and equipment across UC Santa Barbara, and improvements and pitfalls we encountered in the process. If other campuses are interested in reproducing the technology for their instrumentation or other applications, the code can be made available.

Learning Objectives

  • Enhance communication and access to instrumentation resources at their campuses.
  • Increase the use efficiency of existing investments, environmental resources, and scientific research time, using a different approach from traditional sustainability efforts.
  • Use the UCSB Shared Instrumentation website at an example or as source code to create their own campus-wide instrumentation database.

Biography:

Amorette Getty is the Director of the Materials Research Facilities Network (MRFN) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as the Co-Director of the LabRATS Program at UCSB. Dr/ Gett'y work focuses on improving research efficiency in the broadest sense, connecting researchers and resources, laboratory operations and equipment, and building operations for a maximally productive and sustainable environment. She received her PhD in Materials at UCSB for work in solid state lighting.

 

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