The University of Potsdam has around 20,000 students and employs approximately 3,000 staff. The computer center, the central IT department, consists of just under 100 employees. At the same time, many departments and institutes have their own decentralized administrators who take care of IT needs on site.
At the end of 2023, several of these decentralized IT administrators approached the central IT department because they had identified a common need: All of them had hosted an electronic lab notebook or were in the process of setting one up. On the one hand, these IT administrators were well versed in electronic lab notebooks and supported daily work on site, but wanted to avoid duplication of work in their areas. On the other hand, the central IT department did not have enough free capacity to take on an unknown service, familiarize itself with it, and set up a central offering.
This challenge led to a new cooperation model between central and decentralized IT administrators, combining their respective strengths. In the future, the central IT department would take over administration and also handle common issues such as backups and administrative matters. Updates would be installed in a division of labor: while central IT would install changes and provide test instances, decentralized IT administrators would perform functional tests and ensure that target systems ran without errors. Administration, training, and user support would remain in the decentralized areas, as suitable concepts and materials were already available there. The central instance would be set up jointly, incorporating the automation tools commonly used for the central IT department.
The electronic lab notebook was set up jointly as planned. The pilot phase came to an end in the summer of 2025, and since then, eLabFTW has been a central productive service known as ELN.UP, which is enjoying steadily growing popularity. The experience of all those involved has been evident in all phases of the project, enabling a new offering that would not otherwise have been possible. At the outset, all departments defined criteria for successful operation so that the new cooperation model can be evaluated in the future. Here, too, the central IT department was able to benefit from the existing experience of the decentralized IT administrators.
In summary, the project has achieved valuable synergy effects by effectively combining the different areas of expertise of those involved. Although the development phase of the project took longer than originally planned, it will result in long-term benefits for both the University of Potsdam and the eLabFTW community. Thanks to the UP's commitment to further developing central IT services and commissioning adjustments by the manufacturer, the public core of eLabFTW will be expanded, further strengthening the already solid foundation. The University of Potsdam is delighted to be part of the global community of eLabFTW users.
The development was particularly supported by the Institute of Biochemistry and Biology (Cell Biology Group / Prof. Dr. Ralph Gräf), the Institute of Geosciences (Mineralogy / Prof. Dr. Max Wilke), the Institute of Physics and Astronomy (Management / Prof. Dr. Philipp Richter), the Institute of Computer Science and Computational Science (Software Engineering Chair / Prof. Dr. Anna-Lena Lamprecht), the Institute of Chemistry (Organic Synthesis Chemistry Chair / Prof. Dr. Bernd Schmidt), and the Collaborative Research Center 1636.