I work in a molecular/parasitology research lab. I'm looking into electronic tools for helping manage and organize my lab. Does anybody use Airtable for this? If so, do you have any tips or templates to share? I'm trying to set it up for managing our chemical lists, supplies inventory, freezer maps, bio-safety compliance documents, etc. I'm having some difficulty figuring out how to use Airtable for these needs so if anybody has any suggestions or templates to use I would really appreciate it. Or, suggestions of other softwares to use would be appreciated as well.
Thanks!
Hello Indira,
in our lab (solid state physics) we don't use Airtable but we use Jira and Confluence. I had a look at the Airtable features and as far as I see there is a big overlap in features like tasks, (kanban)-boards, timelines, etc as both softwares seems come from software development background. Nevertheless I think Jira+Confluence offers some more features like Wiki style pages, support for inline view of Microsoft office documents (like spreadsheets and presentations) and you can host Jira+Confluence on your own server which lifts all "only x GB of space per project" limits. A non self hostet plan is also available.
In our (rather small) group we use Jira for:
- Tracking tasks and project states.
- Recording measurements (we have a ticket per mesaurement and attach the resulting files to that ticket).
We use Confluence for:
- Keeping record of our weekly meetings.
- Write How-To manuals for all our setups
- Keeping a browsable list of all degree theses.
- Keeping a list of companies and suppliers.
- Sharing ideas for new experiments with collegues.
- Confluences together with the measurement records doubles as digital lab notes.
Both, confleunce and jira, are tighly coupled and you can cross link jira tickets in confluence and confluence pages in jira.
Another software I use for some hobby projects is Phabricator. It is free (unless not self hosted) but even more geared towards software development and version control. But it also supports tickets/tasks, boards, wiki, calender and more.
Feel free to ask if you have more specific questions.
Kind regards
Hi Dennis,
Thanks so much for the info! When I started looking at Airtable I hadn't realized how much it is geared towards software development - while it could help with generally managing projects for my lab, it seems that it won't quite fit the needs of a wet lab. But I will look into Jira & Confluence! Confluence in particular sounds very helpful.
Thanks again.
IC
There are many organization software programs out there. As far as " managing our chemical lists, supplies inventory, freezer maps", I like Quartzy. It is simple, easy to use and I have been using it for years. Unfortunately, Quartzy no longer has the option of document storage. Other programs that I have used with Success are Asana, MeisterTask and SciNote ELN. I personally like the Quartzy for all ordering and inventory items and Asana for everything else.
We are using labwidget.com
Its a lightweight database for small groups. Capable of creating tables for all lab reagents and attaching records. Search is fast. A lot cheaper than Airtable or Filemaker.
https://www.g2.com/categories/technology-review-platforms Where Quartzy is popular and Benchling at the institutional level is now a "win" for students transitioning to industry...particularly if they are in CRISPR and high throughput collaborative projects. A good ELN or LIMS should store all the assets and track materials. Large in house collections? Librarians are not all employed by the books n papers crowd. Universities are beginning to realize how much of the grant is spent generating data sets that are not physical specimens... but may be images tied to raw files from the equipment or an outsourced service. Retractions due to broken chain on the data trail...students need to be thinking this way from the get go and their "hands on labs" may be 1 member of the team at the bench while others are processing data and others are planning the next days bench work. "Rotate" and distance. Communication skills? Students are learning and developing product by recognizing "gaps in knowledge" and function. I wish there was a push for better scheduling and com years ago. I date back to sketch the gel using graph paper and a pencil... to save on polaroid film. Change. Get on board and sign up for the news letter for whatever you use. The number of items in storage gets bigger...and you get older... csv files are portable. Just hire some help if its snow balling out of control.
Genemod is a new platform for both inventory and ELN management. They've done a great job on making an intuitive and visual interface, and they have both free and paid plans. Would highly recommend taking a look at them.
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