University of Tasmania : Opening internal directories

A Contacts section remarkable not for its comprehensiveness – impressive as that is – but its visibility and availability to the outside world.

The Site

University of Tasmania, Australia’s fourth-oldest university, has almost 16,000 students spread across four main sites. Its website’s Contacts section is a comprehensive directory covering telephone numbers and e-mail addresses, web sites, internal post box numbers and campus maps as well as links to five related external directories.

Under University Contacts, the index page offers enquirers four distinct views of the telephone/e-mail information – search for staff number, combined telephone/e-mail, phone by department and whole university phone – and options to download the phone data by name or department. There are also two views of the online e-mail directory, while Web Sites offers separate academic and administrative lists. Main departmental and administrative phone numbers are listed on the index page, though this is only clear by scrolling, which also reveals campus-specific details and the maps link.

The Takeaway

As long as there have been multi-departmental, multi-site organisations internal directories have been essential to their everyday functioning. What is remarkable about University of Tasmania’s Contacts section is not its comprehensiveness – impressive as that is – but its visibility and availability to the outside world.

It is no accident that when organisations set up an intranet one of the first things they put online is their internal directory. They are useful, time-saving for individuals and resource-efficient for the organisation, especially when endowed with the functionality and organisation that University of Tasmania has applied to its Contacts. Why not extend and share those benefits by giving the organisation’s external audience access to the directory?

Some will worry about gatekeeping, call monitoring or trawling by spammers and decide to limit the amount of contact information they make openly available. But University of Tasmania is an early sign of an increased softening of the rigid frontier between internal and public websites.

First published on 17 February, 2005