BANNER & ONLINE SERVICES

• << Back to SPU Online Services

White Pages
To use the SPU White Pages, enter one or more search terms and press 'Search the Directory.' The White Pages uses a "find what I mean" approach to automatically match search terms against all available information in the directory, including name, address, department, position, phone number, and more. Your results are displayed ranked by quality, best first, and the top-scoring results are shown with a darker background.

Information Privacy:
Extensive, granular control over their information is provided for all users of the directory. Through the Banner Information System, users can elect to show or hide most directory fields. Additionally, users can maintain different display permission for external users than apply to internal users.

By default, all members of the directory must display their name and relationship to the University to all audiences. Additionally, staff and faculty must display their campus mailing address, day phone, e-mail address, and employment information to all audiences.

Students must display their email address and WebSpace to authenticated users, but may elect to hide both from unauthenticated users.

Staff and faculty may elect to hide their WebSpace from unauthenticated users as well.

The simplest way to visualize the policy governing your directory information is to log into the Banner Information System and view your directory permissions.

Students may also submit a written request to Student Academic Services to have all directory information hidden from the White Pages by placing a confidentiality flag on their academic record.

Search Privacy:
SPU collects and retains aggregate information regarding the use of the White Pages. Personally-identifiable information on search habits, however, is not collected.

Authenticated vs. Unauthenticated Operation:

• The default directory display permissions are substantially more permissive for authenticated users than for unauthenticated users, and individuals can maintain different sets of permissions for each audience.
• The White Pages will display no more than 20 entries to an unauthenticated user. There is (practically) no limit to the number of displayed results for authenticated users.
• An unauthenticated user's search must match 70% of the terms entered. There is no such restriction for authenticated users.
• Respelling done for an unauthenticated user is stricter than when done for an authenticated user.
• Unauthenticated users are allocated much less space for intermediate results when executing compound searches.
• Unauthenticated users can use only one operator per search.

The above restrictions are in place for two reasons. First, limiting the functionality and information provided to unauthenticated users protects the privacy and safety of SPU's students, staff, and faculty. Second, many of the above restrictions serve to conserve computer resources for use by the SPU community.

The unauthenticated version of the White Pages will still perform excellently for conventional searching by name, department, and so forth, but makes abuse of directory information more difficult.

Updates and Corrections:
The information contained in the White Pages is based on the data stored in the Banner Information System. Students should send directory updates to Student Academic Services, and employees should send updates to the Office of Human Resources.

To update your White Page personal information and preferences, click on the Banner link, log in to Banner with your confidential account, and choose the "White Pages" menu item.

More Features:
The rest of this document details all of the features and capabilities of the White Pages that may be of interest to “power users,” with the most generally useful information first.

The White Pages uses a combination of three primary techniques to quickly find and rank your results – stemming, respelling, and contextualization.

• Stemming: By default, the White Pages requires only that your search terms match the start of the directory entry. For example, a search for “wa” will match “Wallace,” “Washington,” and “Warren.” A single search term enclosed in double quotes will not be stemmed. The White Pages does not support searching for quoted phrases.
• Respelling: The White Pages will also find words in the directory that sound similar to the term you entered. “Derrick” and “Darik” both match “Derek,” for example. Note, however, that “dar” will not match “Derek,” since the terms neither sound the same nor does “Derek” start with “dar.” Search terms that include numbers are not respelled, and a respelling will not match directory entries that contain numbers. “Rod” won't match “23rd,” even though the letters in the two words sound the same. A search term enclosed in double quotes also won't be respelled. A search term followed immediately by an asterisk will be stemmed but not respelled.
• Contextualization: If two or more search terms are entered, the results are ranked by context. Directory entries that match terms more closely together are prioritized over entries that do not. For example, a search for simply “Alex” will prioritize people named Alex. A search for “Alex 2,” though, will prioritize entries for people on the second floor of Alexander hall, since the two search terms appear most closely there.

In addition to the above, the White Pages provides the following additional functionality:

• Case Insensitivity: All text typed into the White Pages search is treated case insensitively.
• Search Within Results: Use this feature to apply the search terms entered to the currently displayed results instead of to the complete directory.
• Find Related: Each entry is displayed with a ‘Find Related People' link. This link executes a query to find other individuals similar to the one displayed. For staff members, related people might include people with similar jobs, assistants, etc.
• Category Bias: The ranking algorithm is slightly biased toward matching search terms against name fields in the directory. The bias is applied after all other techniques are employed, and is most significant in ranking single term searches. To avoid the bias when not searching for a name, enter another term to provide context (e.g. “Alex 2” for Alexander Hall 2nd floor instead of people named Alex), or use category constraints.
• Category Constraints: To limit what elements of the directory a search term is matched against, prefix the term with “category=,” where the category is one of the ones listed later. For example, a search for “student” will obviously return a great many people, but to limit the results to those who work in SAS or SFS, you might enter “department=student” instead. In this particular example, “student serv” would've worked just as well, due to stemming and contextualization. Note that a category constraint applies to all terms to the right of the constraint, so “department=comp info Derek” will try to match “comp,” “info,” and “Derek” against the department field. A bare “=” will set the category back to “ALL.” The character “:” is identical to “=” in all respects.
• Term synonyms: If a search term is eligible for respelling and appears in the synonym list exactly as entered, the term is removed from the search and replaced with its synonyms. “CIS,” for example, is a synonym for “department='computer' ‘info' ‘systems'.” A complete list of term synonyms is provided later.
• Category synonyms: Many of the categories have a one-character name that can be used in place of the longer name. “L=Wallace” is equivalent to “last_name=Wallace,” for instance. A complete list of category synonyms is provided later.
• Result Set Caching: The White Pages caches recently retrieved results to speed up subsequent fetches on the same search. This speeds up retrieval of the second page of a search and is used by the ‘Search Within Results' feature and when executing compound searches, such as ‘Find Related People'.

Advanced Syntax
The White Pages supports a simple, list-based command language for advanced searching, which recognizes two elements, operators and result sets.

A result set is simply a ranked list of directory entries produced by the execution of a simple search. A simple search is a search using any of the syntax described previously, but no operators. All operators take as arguments one or two result sets and return a result set. The associativity of all operators is left-to-right, and they are all of the same precedence.

For the purpose of the following discussion, the square brackets will represent the search box on the White Pages and a symbol such as #1 will represent a result set.

A simple search of one or more terms [a b c] produces a single result set that is then displayed. If the search contains an operator, though, each simple search is executed separately, then the operation is applied to the two result sets produced, returning the final result set.

For example, for the search [a b + c d], two simple searches are executed and then their intersection is calculated. If the search contains multiple operators, the same procedure is followed.

For example, to execute [a b + c d - e f]:

•  Execute the simple search “a b” and store the results in #1.
•  Execute the simple search “c d” and store the results in #2.
•  Evaluate #1 + #2 and store the results in #3.
•  Execute the simple search “e f” and store the results in #4.
•  Evaluate #3 - #4 and store the results in #5.
•  Display #5.

Curly brackets can be used to change the order of operation.

To execute [a b - {c d | e f}]:

•  Execute the simple search “a b” and store the results in #1.
•  Execute the simple search “c d” and store the results in #2.
•  Execute the simple search “e f” and store the results in #3.
•  Evaluate #2 | #3 and store in #4.
•  Evaluate #1 - #4 and store in #5.
•  Display #5.

Generally, a simple search is executed at most once, regardless of how many times it appears in the search expression. If the results are needed subsequently, they are retrieved from the cache.

In the search [{a b - e} | {f g + e}], “e” is only executed once. Since result set caching is keyed semantically, not syntactically, in [{a b - c d} ! {b a - d c}], only two simple searches are executed; “b a” is equivalent to “a b” and can use the latter's cached results, and likewise “d c” can use the results retrieved for “c d.”

To find Theology faculty who do not have WebSpaces, you might execute: [theology faculty - myhome]. To find people housed on Ashton second or third floor who are not named Larry, [d=ashton 2 | d=ashton 3 - n=Larry] would do the trick.

Below is a complete list of operators:

Operator	Meaning
+	Intersection: a + b returns all directory entries that are returned by both the simple search "a" and "b." Scores are summed. The 'Find Within Results' feature uses this.
-	Subtraction: a - b returns all entries in "a" that aren't in "b"
^	Outer join: a ^ b returns all entries in either "a" or "b." Scores are summed.
|	Abbreviated outer join: same as ^, but truncates results to the length of the shorter of the two operands. This can be substantially faster than ^.
>	Right join: a + b adds the scores of the entries in "a" to corresponding entries in "b" and then returns "b"
<	Left join: like >, but the other way.
!	Interpolation: a ! b normalizes the two result sets' scores and interpolates the results. Similar to ^, but since scores aren't summed, entries that appear in both source lists aren't prioritized.
~	Find related: ~a returns a result set composed of people similar to the first entry in "a." The find related people link uses this.

 

Category and Synonym Lists:

Below is a list of all the categories that the White Pages automatically uses to contextualize searches. They can all be used manually as well, using the syntax described above.

Category	Description
ADDRESS	All address fields
ALL	Most fields
BUILDING_CODE	The dorm code (e.g. "ASH," "ROB").
BUILDING_DESC	Dorm description (e.g. "Ashton Hall")
DAY_PHONE	Daytime phone number
DEPARTMENT	Employee's department
DORM	Dorm code, description, and room number
DORM_PHONE	Dorm room phone number
E-MAIL	E-mail address
EV_PHONE	Evening phone number
FIRST_NAME	First name
JOB	Department and position
LAST_NAME	Last name
LOCATION	MA_STREET_LINE1 for employees, blank for students
MA_ADDRESS	All mailing address fields
MA_CITY
MA_NATION
MA_STATE
MA_STREET_LINE1
MA_STREET_LINE2
MA_STREET_LINE3
MA_ZIP
MIDDLE_NAME	Middle name
NAME	First, middle, last, and preferred name
PHONE	Daytime, evening, and dorm phone
PICTURE	Picture (not in ALL, only ever equals "Y")
PIDM
POSITION	Employee's position
PREF_FIRST_NAME	Preferred first name
PR_ADDRESS	All permanent address fields
PR_CITY
PR_NATION
PR_STATE
PR_STREET_LINE1
PR_STREET_LINE2
PR_STREET_LINE3
PR_ZIP
RELATIONSHIP	“Staff," "Student," "Temp Staff," "Adj Faculty"
ROOM_NUMBER	Dorm room number
SU_ADDRESS	All mailstop address fields
SU_CITY
SU_STATE
SU_STREET_LINE1
SU_STREET_LINE2
SU_ZIP
WEB_SITE	WebSpace address

Below is a list of term synonyms, which are explained above.

Term	Synonym
CAS	department='arts' 'sciences'
CIS	department='computer' 'info' 'systems'
ITS	department='learning' 'resources'
OBP	department='business' 'planning'
pic	picture='y'
SAS	department='student' 'academic' 'services'
SFS	department='student' 'financial' 'service'

Below is a list of category synonyms, which are explained above.

Short name	Long name
A	ADDRESS
D	DORM
E	E-MAIL
F	FIRST_NAME
J	JOB
L	LAST_NAME
M	MIDDLE_NAME
MA	MA_ADDRESS
MS	SU_ADDRESS
N	NAME
P	PHONE
PR	PR_ADDRESS
R	RELATIONSHIP
SU	SU_ADDRESS