OECN White Pages

Names and Addresses of OECN users

This page contains the OECN White Pages:

• About the OECN White Pages
• Searching Instructions

Use the form below to enter your search criteria, then press the submit button.

About the OECN White Pages

The OECN White Pages is a database of OECN users throughout Ohio. Nearly every user (except students) who has an email account on an OECN system is contained in this database. The database contains names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, district, building, etc. At present, there are over 18,000 users in the database.

The database is built cooperatively by the DAS's (Data Acquisition Sites) of the OECN. Each site builds a local database of its own users and periodically submits this information to the central white pages database. Each user of an OECN system may modify their own profile using the UMP (User Mail Profile) program on the OECN menu. In this way, each user is able to ensure that their own profile information is accurate and up to date.

The White Pages database has several limitations which you should keep in mind when performing queries on the database:

1. The White Pages depends on each user entering their own profile information. If a user does not enter complete information in the UMP program, then their information in the White Pages will not be complete. Because the system is farily new, many users in the OECN may not yet be aware of the UMP program.
2. Some uses may choose not to include complete information in their UMP profiles. For instance, a user may not feel comfortable including their telephone number or position code in a public database.

Because of these limitations, you may not always be able to find all the people you are looking for. For instance, queries on the "position code" field or "District IRN" may not return any users, simply because the users have not entered this information into their profiles. For the most part, these are temporary limitations. The quality of the database will improve over time as users enter more complete information into UMP.

Dispite these limitations, the White Pages does contain valid information for many users. Especially, if you know someone's name, you can very quickly find their email address.

Searching Instructions

Searching the White Pages is very simple. For most searches, you just enter the information you know about someone and press the Submit Query button. A list of matching users will be returned.

Tip: Start with a general search first. For instance, just the persons first and/or last name. If you get too many matches, then try again with additional information.

If you receive a "no matches to query" message, it means that there are no profiles which match your search criteria. Perhaps the person spells there name slightly differently than you expect. The search engine used by the White Pages will automatically attempt to search for partial matches when possible but is not always able to do so. In this case, there are other searching techniques you can use (see below).

If there are too many matches, you will get a "too many matches to query" message. The White Pages server will return a maximum of 60 "hits" in a single query. This prevents the white pages from being used to generate "junk mail" mailing lists. In this case, you will need to enter additional (more specific) criteria and submit the query again.

There are also several advanced searching features that you can use:

1. You can use and asterisk (*) as a wildcard when don't know the exactly spelling. For instance, entering "DA* SMITH" in the name field, would match: Dave Smith, David Smith, Dan Smith, etc. If you can't find someone using a full name, try using wildcards to match portions of the name.
2. If you don't know the exact spelling of someone's name, try using the "Sounds like" field. This will attempt to find people with names which sound like the name you enter. The matching is not very precise (it will often find many matches which don't seem to sound like the name), however, in most cases it will find the person you are looking for. For example, entering "smith" will return names like: Smith, Schmidt, Aschemeier but will also return names like Sandy, Sutter and Metz.
3. If you perform a search on fields like "District IRN", "District/Organizaion", "Title", "Position Code" etc but don't get a match, it probably means that the person has not entered a complete profile. When this happens, experiment with leaving different fields blank and using wildcards to search for partial names. For instance, if entering "Northwest" in the "District IRN" field is not successful, try searching for "*North*" in the "District/Organization" field.

Output fields

Another feature of the White Pages is that you can select which fields are displayed for successful matches. By default, all of the important fields are displayed. If you are only interested in certain fields, for instance, telephone numbers, you can use the check boxes to select just the fields you want to see. However, keep in mind, that you should always display enough information to verify that you found the right person.