What is open enventory?

open enventory is an integrated laboratory journal with a literature database and inventory program. It is a web application running in most browsers (Google Chrome, Firefox, Apple Safari, others) and therefore platform independent (find technical information here). The integration makes physical data and safety informationen from the inventory automatically accessible in the laboratory journal. The automatic acquisition of freely accessible data from online databases makes manual data acquisition and catalogue searches obsolete. Accessing the online catalogues also allows price surveys with a mouseclick.

Is it necessary to buy 25 g if you only need 20 mg of a substance? The shared use of chemicals helps to protect the environment while reducing costs The laboratory journal uses the information available in the inventory database and makes the data available for all members of a workgroup. Both inventory and laboratory journal allow data exchange between workgroups on the basis of cooperations.

How dangerous is a chemical? Which safety measures need to be taken? The goals of open enventory are:

• to make unnecessary and boring tasks in the laboratory obsolete: searching for chemicals, price surveys.
• to make knowledge accessible inside and outside (if access is granted) the workgroup, for longer periods.
• to improve working safety be easily accessible safety instructions.
• to reduce waste amounts and unnecessary costs by an easily searchable inventory database.

Currently, the software can be used in German, English, French or Spanish language. More language files and localisations can be created in short time.

Many useful functions make working in the laboratory easier open enventory is free software (AGPL). We would appreciate if other groups use the program and contribute to the development. This can be done by

• developing and maintaining the modules to extract data from internet catalogs,
• creating extensions to read more spectroscopic file formats,
• supplying catalog data,
• translating the software
• or contributing useful extensions.

We hope that this program is useful for many people and would like to thank all contributors. Read also our FAQ. Here you can test a database with a read-only user. If you are interested in an extended test account or you want to participate in this project, please send an email to fr@sciformation.com.

At Sourceforge, you can download a stable version of the software and see more screenshots. If you like open enventory, why don't you become a fan on facebook?