Tiedoksi/For your information!
-Tiina
From: Veli-Pekka Ronkainen Sent: 21. elokuuta 2014 11:45 Subject: Important info for BCO light microscopy users
Dear LM users,
A new busy microscopy season is about to start, and many of you are struggling to find suitable microscopy times for your experiments.
We try to alleviate that issue by bringing some important changes in to our practices and user policy.
The lack of free microscopy time has been partly due to continuous misuse of the reservation system. - Users have reserved more time than they really need "to be on the safe side". - There have been also totally unused reservations, without an OBLIGATORY cancellation of the time not needed. - These "empty reservations" lead to unacceptable, non-efficient use of our limited capacity.
Cancellations have to be done as early as possible, but from now on at least 1h BEFORE THE RESERVATION STARTS. It is also necessary to revise the reservation time from the start/end, if a user does not need the reserved time in whole. If these problems still persist in the future, we are forced to change our user policy so that the microscope usage will be charged according to the reserved time, NOT the actual usage hours.
From now on, a reservation without a POST-CONFIRMATION of the actual usage hours (used or just non-cancelled) will be marked as used in Asimov. Usage will be charged according to the whole reservation time.
It is important that microscopes are turned off by the last user of the day. It is URGENT to check the up-to-date reservation status from Asimov before finishing a session and turning off the system. Also in that sense it is important to cancel not needed reservations beforehand. If the microscope is left turned on unnecessarily e.g. overnight, running time will be charged from the last user, or from the later user who made an unused reservation without a prior cancellation, and did not appear.
Overnight time-lapse experiments should be run outside the office hours, and long-term multi-day experiments should be started on Friday afternoons and run over weekends.
Regards, Veli-Pekka Ronkainen Biocenter Oulu Light Microscopy Core Facility