Information about people

The information held in Lookup on each individual splits into three categories:

• CRSid and institution: you cannot edit these yourself, nor control their visibility
• Registered name, surname, MIS status (staff or student) and group membership: you cannot edit these yourself, but you can control their visibility.
• All other items: you can edit these yourself and you can control visibility item by item.

This page does not describe how to change information in the directory. Information on how to change items that you cannot edit yourself, on privacy and the University directory, and details for editing and controlling visibility of data yourself can all be found in the left hand navigation.

The data items held for each person are described in more detail below, together with their initial values. In some cases the Computing Service inserts initial values, some taken from other University databases such as CamSIS or CHRIS; in other cases they will initially be blank. Most of the attributes described are multi-valued; you may have more than one of them (e.g. institution, telephone number). Those that are not are explicitly labelled as single-valued.

• CRSid (e.g. rjd4) as issued by the Computing Service: This is single-valued and is the fundamental key for the individual, to which all other data items (attributes) are attached.
• Institution(s) (e.g. University Computing Service): Initially in the directory you are given the (single) institution to which you are linked in the Computing Service database, Jackdaw. In the directory you may belong to more than one institution; adding a member to an institution can only be done by the institution's authorised editing group, not by the individual. See also what is an institution in the directory?.
• Registered name (e.g. R.J. Dowling): taken from the Computing Service user database (single-valued)
• Surname or family name (e.g. Dowling) taken from the Computing Service user database (single-valued). This is the primary key used for searching the directory via the web interface (LDAP clients may use a variety of search keys).
• Display name (e.g. Bob Dowling): This is the friendly name that you choose to have displayed. Its initial value will be the same as the registered name. This is a single-valued parameter. You may use a foreign script for your display name, but remember that this risks confusing people who are trying to look you up in the directory.
• Role(s) (e.g. Senior Tutor, Director of Personnel). You can have more than one role.
• Primary email address (e.g. rjd4@cam.ac.uk): If you have an @cam address it will be put here automatically. If it has previously been registered as ex-directory then it will be marked as private. You are not obliged to have an @cam address here and you may change it to whatever you want; you are advised to test it for accuracy if you change it. This is a single-valued parameter, as our experiments with various mail clients have demonstrated that they do not cope well with multi-valued mail attributes.
• Other email addresses: We also support entries for alternative email addresses but while these are visible to the web interface most mail clients won’t see them. The alternative email addresses are multi-valued; it is only the primary email address that is single-valued.
• Phone number (e.g. 34600 (Reception)): your main University number(s) will usually be filled in and updated by institutional administrators. Note that you can attach institution labels to your phone number(s) to distinguish them. You may add mobile phones and pagers though we suggest that you only add entries if you carry a work mobile or pager.
• Postal address: This is intended for office addresses or College room numbers. If you want to add an entry then by all means do but bear in mind the security implications of doing so.
• Web pages: Initially this item is blank. You can use this entry to record the URLs of your home page and/or work web pages.
• Photograph: Initially this is empty. You may upload a small photograph in JPEG format no more than 300x300 pixels in size. You may have more than one photograph.  We respectfully remind all users that we reserve the right to bring disciplinary action against anyone who misuses the directory.

Besides the main page for each person in the directory, there are up to three other pages accessed through tabs at the top of the page. The Details tab leads to a page containing some more details not shown on the main page, in particular the origin of each attribute value (e.g. which database it came from or who edited it).  At some time other items such as student number may be added here.

The groups tab leads to a list of groups of which you are a member; this information can have its visibility set either for the whole group by the group managers, or separately by each individual. You cannot change your group membership; only the managers of a group can add or remove members.

For your own page you will also see a History tab which gives dates of changes to your page, and who made them.

There are some other entries in the database but these are ‘behind the scenes’ parameters that are never directly supplied to end users.