Today we shipped the latest version (v3) of our Staff Directory. This is the most heavily used of the LNCD creations, underpinning public profiles for staff members as well as helping to build parts of the corporate website.
Today’s release brings a new look to profile pages, based on feedback from the past few months of operation. It also brings with it a brand new profile editor, replacing the editor on our Blogs platform. The new editor helps staff complete their profiles in a much more structured way, with more robust validation, meaning that when we re-expose the data to the world it’s significantly cleaner. This new data is responsible for the biggest change yet to how Directory works.
Previously the Directory gleaned all of its data from various sources around the University, then did some work to tidy it up as best we could before presenting it. Instead Directory now takes its information exclusively from our Nucleus data platform, and when people edit their profile the changes are written back into Nucleus. Coupled with the newly structured data this allows us to build a very powerful web of knowledge which gives us insights in previously impossible ways. This is our first step to making Nucleus more than just a collection of data gleaned from elsewhere, making it the only source of some information. Over the coming months we plan to move more stuff to having Nucleus as its primary source (specifically information around research projects, and supplementary Estates information used for geolocation).
If you’re interested in taking a look at the data behind Staff Directory, check out the people catalogue on Data.Lincoln.
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