Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Assigning Animals to Protocols

Mosaic Vivarium very carefully tracks animal usage under Protocols (Permits).

Actually, what is tracked is the assignment of an animal to an Allocation of a Master Protocol.  Some sites do not distinguish between the Master Protocol and the Allocations.  They simply create a single Allocation for each Master Protocol.

When you assign an animal to a Protocol Allocation, a record is kept of who made the assignment and when.  If the animal is later assigned to a new Protocol Allocation, history of any previous assignments is still maintained.  This leads to a difference between the “Total Used” and the “Total (currently) Assigned” values on the Protocol worksheet.  You can read more by visiting this help topic from the Protocol worksheet “How do I…” link:

3-20-2013 4-59-11 PM

Whether to track all Protocol Allocations to which an animal has ever been assigned, or to track just the last Protocol Allocation is a matter of site animal use policy.  However, Vivarium’s history tracking tends to make life a little more difficult for sites where only the last Protocol Allocation is relevant.  It is also a little time consuming to correct errors.

To address this, we’ve added a new privilege that will allow selected users to simply replace all animal use history with the most recent assignment.  This privilege is not enabled by default, so if you do nothing, Mosaic Vivarium will behave as always.  However, if you would like to use this convenience, read the “Transfer Animals to another Protocol” online help topic available from the Animal and Protocol worksheet “How do I…” links:

3-20-2013 4-32-19 PM