How to edit and control your personal data

Most of the data in the directory about you will normally only be changed by you, or where appropriate your Departmental administrators. The exceptions are your CRSid, institution, registered name or surname,  MIS status, and group membership, none of which you can change yourself; of these you can control visibility of the last four but not the first two. Information about how to get these entries changed is here.

Everything else (display name, phone numbers, email addresses, postal address, photograph, URLs) is primarily under your control. You cannot change any other user’s data unless you are in the editors' group for their institution.

To edit your information, you need to select the Edit button visible to you on your page in the directory. This takes you to a new editing page where you can change items and their visibility, and in some cases provide additional values.  When you have completed your edits, select OK at the bottom of the page; otherwise the edits will not take effect. Note that if one of your changes is not accepted, then none of the edits will take effect.

You will also see on the editing page an Advanced tab; this gives you further information about entries in your Lookup data, including date ranges and sources, and allows you to add comments and visibility settings to items you cannot edit.  Clicking Edit when you are looking at the Details tab also gives you these further options.

Controlling visibility

You have the right to control the visibility of any items of data about you in the directory except for your CRSid and institution (we have sought advice from the University's data protection officer and believe that the combination of the information that "someone with identifier rjd4 works for the CS" is not personal data, unlike the rest of the information). Note that even people who are allowed to see or change your data are not allowed to alter its visibility.

Visibility of directory items can be set (item by item) to any of four levels.

• Private: data can be seen only by you and the editing group for your Institution
• Institution: data can be seen only by the members of any Institution to which you belong.
• University: data can be seen by anyone with a Raven password.  This is the default state for most of your data.
• World: data can be seen by anyone.  At present this has no effect; Lookup itself will not release such data to the world through either the web interface or the LDAP interface, but it allows you to flag that you have no objection to world visibility, so that future developments using the IBIS database in other ways can take advantage of the permission.

To control visibility of particular items (other than group membership), use the Visibility column on the editing page.To apply a particular visibility level to all applicable items , use the Set all visibilities to feature on your own page. It is hoped that, given that access to the directory is limited by default to Cambridge users, most people will not wish to take this option.

On the editing page you will also see an option labelled "Default visibility". This allows you to specify that if and when new information is added to the directory as a whole (University Student Number is a possible example), you wish that information about you to have a particular visibility setting.

Group membership is handled in a slightly different way; the managers of the group can see your membership even if you have made it private, and so can members of a "privileged access" group for the group in question, who are allowed to see group membership but not to change it. In all these cases the item is marked as being private; other users (whether of the Web interface or of LDAP) cannot see it.  To change visibility of your group membership, go to the Groups tabe on your personal page and us the "Edit group visibility" button.

Notes on editing particular items

For the first five items on your personal page, which you cannot edit yourself, see here.

For the items which can be edited, you have in many cases the facility to add a comment and/or an institution name to the item; this is particularly useful for phone numbers where you belong to more than one institution.

• Display name: this can be anything you like, but it is what will normally appear in lists produced by a search of the directory, or lists of members of institutions, etc., so it needs to be adequate to identify you. It may be helpful to add your first name if you have a common surname.  Foreign scripts can be used, and will normally be correctly rendered by modern browsers; if the web interface can detect that your display name is unlikely to be readable to all users, it will add your registered name to the list.
• Phone numbers: you can have as many of these as you like, but you can only add one in each edit of the page. The comments should be restricted to letters, digits, ()+,-./:? and space, so as not to confuse LDAP clients. All the numbers will appear on your directory page as seen on the web, but if you have multiple phone numbers there is no standard rule about which of them will be reported by an LDAP client. No checks are carried out on the validity of your phone number.
• Email addresses: you can have as many of these as you like, but one has to be marked as "preferred", and LDAP clients will only supply this one. All the addresses you give will appear on your directory page. You can only add one address in each edit of the page. Some basic checks are carried out on the validity of the address, but no check is made that the address actually exists.
• Web pages: you can have as many of these as you like, labelled with comments, but you can only add one in each edit of the page. The opening string of the URL has to be http:, https: or ftp:, but otherwise no checks are carried out on the validity of the URL.
• Postal address: You can have multiple postal addresses.
• Photograph:  You have the option to upload a photograph that you already have on the system on which your browser is running, and you will then be taken to the normal file selection window for your operating system. Files should be in JPEG format and not more than 340x300pixels.  You can have multiple photographs.