The VICC thoracic biorepository catalogs nearly 150,000 specimens of various types (e.g., resection tissue, biopsy tissue, sputum, pleural fluid, bronchial brushes, plasma, serum, etc.) collected over 25 years within VICC’s thoracic oncology program, along with clinical, pathological, and imaging annotation data relevant to each specimen. In recent years, the database underlying this system ceased to effectively support the collection, and we undertook a major effort to clean, reshape, and migrate the data to a more stable platform that would be better able to meet program needs. This data migration process required our team to become intimately familiar with the existing data and data structure, through studying the dataset as well as hours of conferencing with biorepository stakeholders.