The Image Management Core is a new service being offered by HMS IT with support of the Tools And Technology Committee. The primary goal of the IMC is to provide tools and services to HMS researchers, labs, departments, and cores for the management of images and metadata. Initially the main offering will be to set up and maintain an OMERO image management server for use by the HMS Quad community. The HMS OMERO server is being established as a two year pilot project and is being funded jointly by HMS IT, TnT, and the Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology.

The aim of the pilot is to deploy OMERO as a free service to be used by HMS quad researchers, labs, facilities, departments, and cores. Depending on the outcome of this pilot OMERO may be adopted as a permanent service of HMS IT alongside the file server, network, compute, and other services now being offered. 

We will be encouraging researchers to try OMERO and tell us how it works for them. Because of our close relationship with the open source community developing OMERO we have an opportunity to help guide the development of new features and capabilities to suit our particular needs. We will be actively seeking user input on this. 

While we plan to support the standard image storage and management features that OMERO, we will be also developing unique capabilities leveraging the other imaging services and resources available at HMS. Specifically, our goal is to make it possible to use OMERO in conjunction with the Orchestra compute cluster. We also plan on working closely with the Image and Data Analysis Core, the Nikon Imaging Center, and Research Imaging Solutions to develop workflows and strategies that will make producing, managing, publishing, and sharing microscopy images using these existing campus resources easier, more flexible, and more efficient.