Search Tips for the UW Faculty/Staff/Student Directory

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Tips for Searching Faculty/Staff/Students Directory

Types of Searches

You may search by:

Name: The most common (and therefore the default) search. This is the personal name of the party you're searching for.
Department: The person's departmental affiliation. This data is reported for the directory in a very inconsistent way, so this search is not as reliable as it could be.
Email: The person's email address.
Box number: The UW mail routing code. People who work together often share the same routing code, so this may serve as a sort of small-scale departmental affiliation.
Phone: The person's telephone number.

Search Results

The search you enter may be interpreted in more than one way. For example, the name ``roosevelt'' might be either a last name or a first name. Each interpretation that finds a match in the directory will be reported along with the number of matches, and the results for each type will be displayed in that order.

Searching by Name

Do I have to use the person's full name? No, it isn't critical that you know the person's full name, just enter what you know. (Case is not significant; that is, you don't have to capitalize names.) The name you enter will automatically be interpreted somewhat loosely, in order to find matches that are close but not identical. For example, you might find "George Berkeley" by searching for "geo berk".

What if I get too many matches? A very common name may find more matches than can be reported, and the result will say "too many matches, list truncated" in this case. Use more complete names to resolve this.

How can I get more exact matches? If you want to exercise more control over approximation, you can use the wildcard character '*'. In the example above, you would use "geo* berk*", but you can put as many wildcards as you need, anywhere in the name. For example, '*ob*' matches either "Robert" or "Bob". The wildcard matches anything (including blank white space) between names.