[Bnc-faculty-all-list] Coral Reservation Abuse - ACTION REQUESTED - on behalf of John Weaver

[Peroulis, Dimitrios]

Dave,

Thanks for your email. Besides Eric's and Steve's suggestions, there was also a proposal from me yesterday.

As for the P&P committee handling the issue, I believe it is a bit too big to handle this. The P&P only gets together once a month or so and many times there are irresolvable conflicts for faculty (e.g. teaching - that was the case for me last semester). On the other hand, the subcommittee that handles violations (headed by Tim Fisher) is much smaller and has meetings on a need-to-discuss basis when a problem arises. I believe we need to handle this issue that way.

Thanks
Dimitri



-----Original Message-----
From: bnc-faculty-all-list-bounces at ecn.purdue.edu [mailto:bnc-faculty-all-list-bounces at ecn.purdue.edu] On Behalf Of David B. Janes
Sent: Saturday, August 28, 2010 3:56 PM
To: Jeff Goecker
Cc: Weaver, John R; BNC Faculty
Subject: Re: [Bnc-faculty-all-list] Coral Reservation Abuse - ACTION REQUESTED - on behalf of John Weaver

BNC Faculty Colleagues:

As part of this thread, Eric and Steve have made suggestions regarding how to rectify the situation.  I would like to point out that the Policy and Procedures committee has discussed this general issue several times in the past (although not the specific recent situation addressed in John's email).  While "suspend privileges" 
or "charge the account even if the equipment is not used" may be valid approaches in some situations/equipment, there are legitimate cases where a reserved slot cannot be used.  For example, in many processes, a number of pieces of equipment are needed in sequence; if one piece of equipment is down, there is no use for the next piece of equipment.  
Likewise, if a prior processing step does not work properly.  Couple this with the fact that we have a number of time-critical process steps, and there will be unavoidable times where a sign-up slot would not be used - and would not likely be of use to other people (since they would not have time to perform the prior processing steps).

That being said, the situation described in John's email is way beyond these circumstances. 
Please discuss the situation with your students -- particularly those who have been frequent violators.
I view this as one of several "citizenship" issues that we have at Birck
-- other issues include mis-use/breakage of equipment, failure to clean up after one's self, and use of other groups' specialty chemicals/supplies without permission and/or without contributing to replacement costs.

By way of cc, I will ask John and/or Jeff to provide a copy of the spreadsheet (omitted from the original email),

As I said in an earlier email, we have put the P&P committee on indefinite hold -- primarily due to lack of participation by faculty.  
If you would like to participate in shaping BNC lab access and safety policies, the P&P committee would be an excellent venue.

Dave


Jeff Goecker wrote:
>
> BNC Faculty –
>
>  
>
> I need your help on a situation that is impacting the ability of 
> researchers to use the BNC equipment.  We are beginning to reach 
> epidemic proportions of people reserving equipment and not using the 
> equipment – and not cancelling their reservations so that someone else 
> can use that equipment.  This practice causes false bottlenecks and 
> leaves the equipment unused.  In the first 8 weeks of this fiscal 
> year, we have had 1165 incidents.
>
>  
>
> An example is one user who has 20 unused and not canceled reservations 
> on the MJB-3 aligner in 8 weeks – that’s 2 ½ unused reservations every 
> week.  This is a very highly used piece of equipment, and we are 
> receiving complaints that this equipment is not available.  This same 
> user has 12 unused and not canceled reservations on the CHA evaporator 
> – another critical piece of equipment.
>
>  
>
> The CHA evaporator has had 82 unused and not canceled reservations in 
> the last 8 weeks, more than 10 per week.
>
>  
>
> Please ask your students to be more courteous to the other researchers 
> in the BNC.  The attached spreadsheet shows those users with at least
> 8 unused and not cancelled reservations in the past 8 weeks by Coral 
> user name.  I have also highlighted incidents where one user had at 
> least 8 unused and not cancelled reservations on a particular piece of 
> equipment.
>
>  
>
> While it is understood that there are legitimate incidents where a 
> user reserves a piece of equipment but cannot use it, this happening 
> at a very high frequency is more likely abuse.
>
>  
>
> Thanking you for your consideration,
>
> John
>
>  
>
> */John R. Weaver/*
>
> */Facility Manager/*
>
> */Birck Nanotechnology Center/*
>
> */Purdue University/*
>
> */(765) 494-5494/*
>
> */jrweaver at purdue.edu/*
>
> */
> /*
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --
>
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