General Instructions
Please Note: Use of the OECN White Pages search utility has been depreciated at some OECN ITCs. As such, your search may not produce complete results.
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.
The database is built cooperatively by the ITCs 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:
- 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.
- 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. Despite 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 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 person's first and/or last name. If you get too many matches, then try again with additional information.
If you receive no matches to a query it means that there are no profiles which match your search criteria. Perhaps the person spells there name slightly different 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 message indicating such. 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:
- You can use an asterisk (*) as a wildcard when you don't know the exact spelling. For instance, entering "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.
- 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.
- If you perform a search on fields like "District IRN"; "District/Organization"; "Title"; 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.