Organising files

[lmh]

I work for an organisation that has large numbers of occasional users of analytical equipment. Some are PhD students who come and go, others are research assistants who might be around, on-and-off, for 30 years or more. We don't have many full-time dedicated analysts, and increasingly people do a lot of their own work.

With file-based chromatography systems, Chemstation and Xcalibur, this works quite well. People are used to working with subdirectories, and tend to divide their work up in meaningful ways. I impose some sort of directory structure above (usually by date, new folders each month, so I can back things up, and so that no individual folder becomes too vast); I persuade them to put their work in a subfolder with their name, and most divide the work inside the subfolder.

With database chromatography systems (Empower and Chromeleon, and MassLynx which isn't a database but still has a "project" concept) it all goes wrong. They make a project, and it just gets bigger and bigger; it's not so bad for a 3 year student, but for a 20-30 year research assistant it's messy. Sometimes they make several projects, usually with unhelpful names ("HPLC" or "Sugars" (forgetting that 15 other people are also measuring sugars), or "John" or "01022013". Very, very few, exclusively in Chromeleon (none in Empower), actually use the database's native ability to trace individual runs and sample-sets. Most just get increasingly confused with an ever enlarging heap of analyses.

This is getting harder and harder to manage. Does anyone have any tips on how to organise ongoing projects in these software packages?

[DR]

We impose a very specific naming convention for projects that involves the type of assay, department, product and a date followed by a letter. At the end of each predetermined period, all users have to make new projects, incrementing the letter. The old ones are locked, archived and (next cycle), removed from the server (after the archived copies have been backed up).

As long as you can keep people from copying *everything* into the new version of the project, this keeps the sizes down.

[lmh]

Thanks DR. You have given me the confidence to be a bit more prescriptive about what people call things. I've just inherited a situation where I have vast heaps of undifferentiated files and no idea whose are whose.