The project serves as the development and documentation space for the back-end of the Nexus Microscopy Facility Laboratory Information Management System (NexusLIMS), developed by the NIST Office of Data and Informatics. This documentation contains a number of pages that detail the processes by which NexusLIMS harvests and combines data from multiple sources to build a record of an experiment on a Nexus facility microscope.

These records conform to the Nexus Experimental schema, published and available at https://doi.org/10.18434/M32245.

As part of the process of open-sourcing this code, a number of private internal references to NIST infrastructure have been removed, meaning a straight-away installation will likely not work without some tweaking. This code is provided as an inspiration and implementation reference, but will require some work to make it generalizable to other infrastructures that has not yet been completed.

Most typical users will have little reason to interact directly with the NexusLIMS back-end code contained in this repository, since it operates completely automatically and builds experimental records without any need for user input. There is extensive documentation however, for those who wish to learn more about the nuts and bolts of how the back-end operates.

The logo for the NexusLIMS project is inspired by the Nobel Prize winning work of Dan Shechtman during his time at NIST in the 1980s. Using transmission electron diffraction, Shechtman measured an unusual diffraction pattern that ultimately overturned a fundamental paradigm of crystallography. He had discovered a new class of crystals known as quasicrystals, which have a regular structure and diffract, but are not periodic.

We chose to use Shechtman’s first published diffraction pattern of a quasicrystal as inspiration for the NexusLIMS logo due to its significance in the electron microscopy and crystallography communities, together with its storied NIST heritage:

NexusLIMS has been developed through a great deal of work by a number of people including:

• Joshua Taillon - Office of Data and Informatics
• June Lau - Materials Science and Engineering Division
• Marcus Newrock - Office of Data and Informatics
• Ray Plante - Office of Data and Informatics
• Gretchen Greene - Office of Data and Informatics

As well as multiple SURF students/undergraduate interns:

• Rachel Devers - Montgomery College/University of Maryland College Park
• Thomas Bina - Pennsylvania State University
• Sarita Upreti - Montgomery College