KNOWLEDGE is power, as the saying goes. It's also just plain convenient. When it comes to managing information, small changes often can make the biggest difference in our daily lives. The University made a good change earlier this year when it added phone numbers to its searchable online database. But it's past time to take the next step - to add address and position information and get rid of the paper phone book.
Eliminating the University phone book makes more sense than would eliminating a city phone book, such as Charlottesville's, for several reasons. Permanent city residents don't have universal Internet access; students do. Most city residents don't move very frequently, so the city phone book remains accurate longer. But most students move every year, which renders University phone books relatively useless about six months after they are issued. They don't become available until near the end of the fall semester - they're still not out this year - and are inaccurate by May.
The database would provide a number of benefits over the paper phone book. Most importantly, it would provide access to student and faculty contact information for the whole year, not just the second half of it. The beginning of the academic year - the time when the phone book isn't available - is the time when that information is needed most.
Friends are learning each other's new addresses and phone numbers; CIOs are compiling contact lists and trying to get information out to their members in a timely fashion; organizational and administrative activities are at their peak. For us at The Cavalier Daily, it's a major nuisance to have to contact dozens of sources for each day's newspaper over the first semester - when most reporters are developing relationships with their sources - without ready access to addresses, titles and phone numbers.
Almost as important is the fact that printing several thousand phone books, each upward of 700 pages thick, kills a lot of trees. That might be justified if print provided benefits that online does not. But the reverse is true - online offers everything that print does and more.
An online phone book would allow for the updating of information that might change during the year. It also would add the possibility of a searchable phone book. Say you don't know someone's last name, but you know their first name and phone number and want their e-mail address. Or say you want to locate everyone from your hometown. Either of those tasks would take hours with a regular phone book, but would take a fraction of that time with an online directory.
The cost of updating an online database from year to year would be quite small; the bulk of updates could be entered by students themselves, who could change their address online.
Student Locator still would exist as a backup to the online database for anyone who might be away from a computer and need an address or phone number right away. But the online database - with 24-hour availability and the power to serve many users at once - would serve as the primary resource for this information.
So why haven't we made this change already? University Registrar Carol Stanley said that the decision was made not to include addresses online because of concerns raised by the Office of the Dean of Students relating to student privacy and safety. Dean of Students Penny Rue explained that the Office of the Dean of Students was concerned that online addresses could facilitate or encourage burglaries, assaults or stalking incidents.
There's an easy way around these concerns, one that lets us retain all the above benefits while still respecting the privacy needs of members of the University community. Students could be given the chance to opt out of the directory if they are concerned about privacy and wanted their address to be unlisted. This wouldn't be a change; students have this option with the print phone book as well. And the whole database could be password protected for off-Grounds users, just like the University Library's VIRGO database is, to ensure that students and faculty have access to personal information but random hackers don't.
This would answer the Office of the Dean of Students 's worries. Any concerns about non-students misusing address information would be solved by password-protecting the database. And while the potential for students to use the contact information of their fellow students to malicious ends, this isn't a change from the status quo, in which the phone book allows the same threat.
It's time to eliminate a paper phone book that wastes trees and only serves its purpose for six months out of the year. We need to go online.
(Bryan Maxwell's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at bmaxwell@cavalierdaily.com.)
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