The USF Live Directory is a place to find up-to-date information about the faculty and staff at the University of San Francisco. It is kept up-to-date because it is very easy for community members to post articles and associate them with people-- no web designer needed! It provides a people-centric search of USF's subset of the web.

Faculty and staff can post articles about themselves. The deans and their staffs also have the ability to post articles about others.

The software allows you to:

• Update your own profile – your homepage, image, and basic info.
• Post articles, videos, podcasts, and accomplishments and associate them to you so they appear on your profile
• Create research and interdisciplinary topic collections and post articles on the topic.
• Keep up-to-date on what's going on with a particular department or interdisciplinary group.
• Search USF's subset of the web in a people-centric way

With a single click you can bookmark a research paper or news article and specify its author and the people who it references. The article then automatically appears on each person's profile as well as all of their collections and the "recent news" page.

Here are some of the benefits to the university:

• Dynamic web presence

The great people and accomplishments of our university can be promoted better. An improved web presence will help with alums and potential donors as well as prospective students.

• Better media relations

Media people can find "experts" through the site directly. Deans and other administrators can use the site to better connect media with faculty/staff.

• Improved collaboration

It’s a shared space for the community to shared their “googling” work. It’s a place to create interdisciplinary groups. It’s a place to find colleagues and potential research collaborators through search and associative discovery.

• Retention of Institutional Memory

Often our deans will send out emails about accomplishments in their school. Unfortunately, only some of the great accomplishments are sent out, and those sent are lost in the “email cloud” and not recorded for posterity on the USF web site. With Personos, the dean and others can post articles in the shared space, and we can all benefit from a more permanent record of the community’s great accomplishments.

• Improved alumni relations

Personos can be used to publicize the achievements of USF alumni, and to engage alumni with the University. Some amazing people have graduated from USF—we should let the world know!

The USF Live Directory is alpha software and still under development: there still may be bugs and glitches. The advantage to USF is that the software is malleable-- Personos encourages you to send in both bug reports and ideas for new features to feedback@personos.com.