Labs

Every person belongs to a lab, and every item may belong to one. The tier says what somebody may do; the lab says what they may do it to. Both have to be satisfied.

Equipment with no owner is common. That is the state everything imported from the spreadsheet starts in, and it behaves exactly as the catalogue did before labs existed: everybody sees it and everybody may borrow it.

What an owner changes

	see it	borrow it	edit it
User	own lab and common	own lab and common	never
Manager	any lab	any lab, others by request	own lab and common
Admin	any lab	any lab, others by request	any lab
Superuser	any lab	any lab, freely	any lab

Editing another lab’s record and walking off with its hardware are different acts. The first helps them and costs them nothing, which is why an admin does it freely and still asks before borrowing.

Scanning another lab’s label

A user who scans a QR code belonging to a lab they are not in gets a page explaining whose the equipment is and offering to ask them, rather than a bare refusal.

Asking to borrow

Requests are made per loan and are spent when the equipment is checked out. Each lab chooses how they are handled, under Admin ‣ Borrowing requests:

Ask us first

The request waits for one of that lab’s admins. They see it in their queue and answer yes or no.

Just tell us afterwards

Permission is granted immediately and the lab is told where its equipment went.

Either way a record exists, which is the point: an item that leaves a lab should never do so silently.

Counting

Category counts, the total on the front page and the numbers beside filters are all narrowed the same way the list is. A category reading 88 next to a list of 60 items would tell you exactly how much is being kept from you, so the numbers and the list always agree.