I’ve written a series of articles exploring how to develop an affordable LIMS system tailored for small R&D labs. I believe you’ll find this information valuable.

Background

I want to take a minute of your time to tell you why I am doing this.

I have been involved with R&D laboratory activities for 20 years. So far, it has been quite an adventure.

During the last few years, I have developed a strong interest in Knowledge Management. I have realised that R&D activities are behind in properly documenting experiments and data. Various software tools are used to interchange information for project proposals, reports, and data interchange.

But what about the future?

Imagine you have the chance to time-travel to the future, say 10 years, and go back to your or your colleague’s R&D data and try to make sense of all that you did, all the data collected, and how you connected to the conclusions you arrived at.

Can you do it?

Testing Laboratories

We, the lab folk, go by many names and many incarnations. We are just a bunch of very dedicated nerds who are grateful to be allowed to play with cool tech. Our massive capacity for attention to detail enables us to unravel mysteries that can help our R&D colleagues with their hypotheses.

Often, we are so focused that we lose sight of the bigger picture—the transcendence of our work to the passing of time.

I see ourselves not only as reporters of numbers but as custodians of the information we create and share, like dedicated librarians who preserve perhaps the most important technological invention of humankind: the ability to communicate by writing.

Data

It is common knowledge that how we communicate is as important as what we communicate. If you are the only one who understands what you did, you are not going as far as you might want to go.

But what happens once the experiment is done and the project is finished?

We move on to the next project, experiment or hypothesis.

What happened with the data we reported, used or not, once our R&D colleagues wrangled and presented it to prove their points?

In my experience, it goes to oblivion, like a book that, once read, is returned to the library.

However, the librarians have not forgotten it. And never will.

Custodians

The data we create contains so much wealth that I think it is a moral imperative to preserve it for the future generation of laboratory professionals who will take the mantle of our well-earned corner of the lab and continue our work.

How do we guarantee that our efforts are preserved and that our future selves do not start from scratch?

Imagine a librarian who torches the library and goes home when the sunset of their career arrives. It does not happen, right?

Knowledge is still there, organised, preserved, accessible and alive.

LIMS

Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) are valuable tools created to support laboratory activities with external customers. Sometimes, they are painfully adapted to support internal quality control operations.

However, they were not designed to support R&D activities, and by laboratory professionals who support R&D activities.

R&D activities could be perceived as chaos compared to external labs or operations. What data information system can adapt to a human activity whose primary purpose is to change and adapt to ever-evolving questions?

However, even chaos can be organised.

If you care.

R&D LIMS

I want to contribute by adapting tools that help us preserve R&D laboratory data and help our organisations preserve wealth. I will try to use tools that are accessible to all, can adjust to limited budgets and laboratory sizes, and are tech-savvy so we can all become custodians of our data.

The path ahead will not be linear; it will be tortuous and full of challenges but one full of lessons to learn and value.

To this end, I will focus on one of the so-called No-code tools, or, in my nomenclature, tools for all.

Let me introduce a very nice tool I have recently discovered: NocoDB.

If you have time, take a look, learn as much as possible about what this beautiful tool does, and imagine the possibilities for our humble but not less ambitious R&D testing laboratory.

If you report data using spreadsheets, you will understand.

NocoDB allows us to report data and preserve it forever in a readable and accessible way.

We do not know it yet. But we will.

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Series Articles

Coming soon.