To CLAS chairpersons:

As we complete year two of our revamped faculty/staff profiles, several of you have expressed interest in allowing a designated administrator to edit profiles on behalf of your faculty as opposed to our current model of each faculty member updating their own profiles.

Prior to our college-wide website revamp, we did utilize such a model where dept. website administrators also managed the faculty/staff profiles. Unfortunately, during our migration to the new system, we found that the directory updates were not being maintained as best as they could be.

Since our new accreditation standards were much more specific to the individual faculty member’s information, we felt that this could best be maintained by each faculty member updating their own profile. While we still believe that this is a good model, we also understand the need to be able to edit this data at will.

Starting today, we’re going to allow for you to designate one to two administrators that will have access to editing faculty/staff profiles which will include access to editing pictures and information within those profiles. Additions and removals of people to/from your dept. directory itself will still need to be processed by our CLAS Marketing Team. Considering the sensitive nature of our directories, we prioritize these changes as soon as they are received.

Because we need to ensure that the HLC accreditation criteria are accounted for, should you decide to designate an administrator to edit the faculty profiles on behalf of your faculty, we would ask for your agreement to oversee that this criterion is maintained by your appointed administrators should the faculty not update their profiles themselves. This process could be as simple as faculty submitting their profile updates to your appointed administrator (from their CV or otherwise) once a semester to be posted to the directory. Our ultimate goal is to ensure that either the faculty or someone you appoint is updating the faculty profiles each semester in accordance with our accreditation standard. Staff profiles, while significant, do not have the same accreditation requirements as faculty.

Due to a current system limitation, all profile administrators will have access to all CLAS faculty/staff profiles – not just their department. This means that an administrator updating faculty profiles for the Department of Mathematics will have access to all faculty/staff profiles within CLAS, not just faculty/staff profiles within the mathematics department. Every administrator will need to be mindful of this and edit with caution.

This is not an ideal setup and is something that we’re addressing as the system is improved. It also why we want to limit the number of administrators per dept. that have profile editing access to limit the risk of error.

We simply ask that your designated administrators exercise caution and only edit the faculty/staff profiles that belong to their dept. and/or are authorized to do. The system does log who edits what in the event that we need to follow up on an error.

To designate an administrator for your department profiles, please complete the CLAS Designation of Directory Administrator Form. (Must be completed by a chairperson.)

To request directory additions or removals (not profile/picture information changes), please complete the CLAS Faculty/Staff Directory Change Form. (Can be completed by any web editor or communicator for your department.)

Mel Mills
CLAS Marketing Team