CLEAN: From Limbo to LIMS

In the late 1990s Dr. Alan McLelland of the Institute of Biochemistry, Royal Infirmary, Glasgow highlighted the multi-faceted nature of a LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System) by pointing out how it is perceived by an analyst, a laboratory manager, an information systems manager, and an accountant, "all of them correct, but each of them limited by the users' own perceptions." [1] At Harvard's CNS the daily conflict between these different points of view gave birth to our own version of a LIMS: CLEAN (CNS Lab Equipment Access Network). The Center for Nanoscale systems operates shared facilities for cleanroom fabrication, imaging, and materials synthesis. Over the past seven years, CLEAN has gone through several transformations until it reached the current configuration, one of a web-based, centralized instrument access management system capable of enforcing scheduling policies, logging equipment usage reports, flagging no-show events, generating invoices, tracking user training, providing real-time dashboards and more. But even this definition does not completely cover what CLEAN does for CNS' people and users every day.