Like those in many scientific fields, electron microscopy (EM) researchers generate data from a myriad of instruments, often utilizing expensive and proprietary software to collect and analyze their results. This software is commonly seat-limited, meaning the researcher is required to perform data analysis on a specific computer. If they are lucky, the researcher may have access to an “offline” license of such software, allowing them to use their personal workstation rather than the one attached to a microscope. In multi-user facilities this can sometimes result in researchers abusing software licenses just to examine their data. More critically, this data (and associated metadata) can typically only be viewed from within the commercial software packages, meaning users are left to their own devices to curate their personal data collection, relying on notes/memory, basic file metadata, and naming conventions to identify the significance of each file (Fig. 1). Such methods are unmanageable over long time spans, or when collaborating with other researchers, often resulting in “abandoned” datasets that are forgotten after publication. Needed instead is a centralized and automated laboratory information management system (LIMS) built on the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data principles [1].