TAG recently heard some concern from faculty about the online Faculty/Staff directory (on my.scranton, under University Links) and its inability to display more than one departmental affiliation for a faculty member. For example, a faculty member in the Department of Latin American Studies and Women’s Studies is listed in the online Directory only as a member of their “primary” departmental affiliation, not as a member of LA/W/S.
We heard from IT Development & Applications (ITDA) that the online Faculty/Staff directory, which pulls information from Banner, cannot accommodate multiple titles or departments for a single person. As a solution, ITDA suggested using the Department/Division directory, which you can search using your browser’s Find feature (Ctrl+F).
However, this proposed solution doesn’t resolve the faculty concerns. Firstly, the Department/Division directory itself is incomplete (for example, the LA/W/S listing only includes three contacts rather than all of the associated and affiliated faculty) and doesn’t display live data (so it doesn’t include 2011-2012 new faculty, and I noticed several faculty and staff members who retired in 2010 and were still listed). More importantly, this workaround doesn’t address the real issue, which is that multiple affiliations are becoming more common for both faculty and staff, and such information should easily accessible and searchable in University directories.
TAG doesn’t have a solution for this issue, but we hope to work with IR to figure something out in the near future. Please let us know if you have any comments or suggestions. Thanks!
