Shared-use characterization facilities face a persistent challenge: capturing rich, structured metadata about who collected data, on what instrument, and under what conditions, all without burdening users with manual record-keeping. NexusLIMS is an open-source Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) originally developed at NIST that addresses this by automatically linking instrument scheduling records to raw data files and extracting instrument-specific metadata, producing searchable experiment records aligned with FAIR data principles. At its core, this is enabled through extensive harvesting of information from the NEMO API, which helps bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds, and allows the system to know who was on an instrument, for how long, and where their files should be located.
To further their data management capabilities, the Singh Center for Nanotechnology at the University of Pennsylvania has recently sponsored the open-source development of version 2.0 of NexusLIMS, resulting in drastically simplified deployment and configuration, serving to democratize advanced data management capabilities for their own users and throughout the wider characterization community. In addition, NexusLIMS now has a modern and flexible plugin architecture to enable metadata extraction from many more types of instruments and support has been added for multiple data repository export destinations. This talk will review these recent developments, as well as how NexusLIMS integrates with a NEMO installation to provide a seamless experience for facility end users. Finally, a brief “getting started” demonstration will illustrate how one can easily get started using NexusLIMS at their facility.