Unis launch equipment sharing site

The University of Warwick has joined a group of research-intensive universities to launch a new website containing a database where students and staff can find shared equipment.

This collaboration, known as the M5 Group, includes the University of Birmingham, the University of Leicester, Loughborough University and the University of Nottingham along with Warwick. Aston University has more recently joined the M5 Group.

The aim of the group is to boost research collaboration and to improve sharing of equipment. M5 hopes to increase efficiency in terms of using the more expensive equipment.

This may be useful to students who require more specialised equipment for their work, for example, students of Computer Science, Nanotechnology or Engineering, who may not have access to certain facilities they require at their own university.

Loughborough’s Kit-Catalogue system allows both students and staff to search through public equipment records from all of the universities, see descriptions and specifications of the devices, and find out the location and contact details so bookings can be made.

The website is the UK’s first regional equipment sharing database, allowing the M5 Group to develop tools needed to make sharing more effective in the future.

The group hopes that the collaboration will encourage funding for specialised equipment which is increasingly focused on a small number of places.

Research Councils UK, which brings together the UK’s seven research councils including Arts and Humanities, Medical Research, and others has supported universities exploring whether there are any efficiencies to be gained in the sharing of equipment.

The M5 Group are also looking at whether this can be taken further by jointly procuring maintenance and servicing if the universities have clusters of similar equipment which could be brought under single service contracts.

The universities have agreed on a consistent measure of charging for use for facilities, which is equitable across all of the institutions.

The next step of the project is to find an easy way of sharing each other’s registers and booking times on the equipment between universities.