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@purdue.edu