JuRSE Code of the Month - April 2026

Each month we highlight a code from Forschungszentrum Jülich and this month's code is SampleDB, co-developed at the Technical Services and Administration of the Peter Grünberg Institute and the Jülich Centre for Neutron Science (PGI-TA/JCNS-TA).

SampleDB
SampleDB is a web-based electronic lab notebook with a focus on sample and measurement metadata. With SampleDB, you can track each step in the sample lifecycle and its schema system allows you to define exactly what metadata should be stored for each process, from a simple check box to time series.

JuRSE selected highlights
SampleDB shows two things: research software does not have to come out of a research group and research software can be very close to the field of research data management. The latter aspect we already know by tools like DataLad or hermes, but the first one is definitely worth a second look. Here, a technical service team identified a need coming out of their institutes and started to create a research software to address it. And creating they did: vast documentations for users, developers, and administrators, a full-fledged website, a JOSS paper, and a proper maintained repository. Not directly doing research, but writing research software? Yes, this is very much feasible. "Good infrastructure serving good science", as they put it.

More information
Website: https://scientific-it-systems.iffgit.fz-juelich.de/SampleDB/
RSD: https://helmholtz.software/software/sampledb
GitHub: https://github.com/sciapp/sampledb