This is the standard search people-view when not logged in. After logging in, you'd see emails, box numbers and major, for undergrads.

In the old site, we had the ability to see additional information on students when you were located on campus. Well, that made sense in the days before wireless coffeehouses/cafes and VPN. Today, more and more of us (including your new media team) work from all kinds of places, and not all of them on campus.

So for this next generation people search, we planned from the beginning to have it respond not to your physical location, but your relationship to Lewis & Clark. If you are a current student, or a faculty or staff member, then you can now see additional information about students simply by logging in. And, if you’ve already logged into the Green or MyLC, it will show up automatically.

While we’ve been working towards this for a while, it was finally made possible by some very recent updates to our single-sign-on rails application — login.lclark.edu — that authenticates everyone for the new media services.

One note, you won’t find this feature available if we don’t have additional information to show you. (Sometimes we don’t get everything — you’ll be able to update that in the future.) And of course, students who’ve choosen to opt out of the directory all together (via FERPA) never show at all.

We hope you enjoy this new feature. It’s just the beginning of the changes to come for people information over the next few months. And as always, give us your feedback!

But that said, every step towards integration helps just a little bit as it’s one less login you have to complete to use some service. So, we’ve built a login application to handle some of these requests, and if you’re using MyLC or the Green, you’ve already used it.

Right now we’re working on a upgrade to the service to give it more latitude in the services it will be able to handle. Initially, we’ll expand it to controlling access to the college and law admitted student sites, and then we’ll be able to continue extending its reach.

We’ve built the system so that any server within the .lclark.edu domain could use it (assuming the app has the ability to integrate it) and in that vein, we’re experimenting with the help of the libraries to have it help authorize users for their feedback tabs in UserVoice.

Look for future updates on this, and maybe a few less logins.

RoR aside, Robb is the main architect of our new search engine and login apps. They started small and have been much improved as we’ve watched people interact with them. But, what you haven’t all known is that like Morgan or I, Robb has had a few projects running on the side and we’ve seen huge benefits to our LC RoR apps from his other endeavors, OregonLaws and Greenfabric (not retired) before it.

Today is a huge day though, as a little over an hour ago, Cory Doctorow posted a story on BoingBoing on the ongoing saga of opening up the rights to our Oregon legal content and cited Robb and his OregonLaws site as great examples of what you can do when access is open. So congrats to Robb!

And, final note to all those tech-hungry people out there. I’ve attached some screenshots of Robb’s site handling the additional traffic easily.