One of the functions of the Core User Directory (CUD) is to store affiliations with units of the University that people have. Affiliations in CUD are scoped in the form status@affiliation, where status can be "Student", "Staff", etc., and affiliation is the name of the unit where the person has that status. The data source that declared the affiliation, a start date, and an end date are stored. Affiliations are declared by both centrally administered systems, such as Student Records and Human Resources, and by units themselves. A single person may have multiple affiliations.
The Affiliations Manager
The Affiliations Manager (AM) enables unit administrators to manage lists of people affiliated with units for which they are administratively responsible.
Affiliations defined within AM are limited in scope to the unit within which they are associated. They supplement affiliations declared by other sources. They are stored on individual person documents within CUD, supplementing affiliations declared by other sources. Scoped affiliations are part of the CUD Attribute Set and so can be used for building queries used for extracting data from CUD.
Affiliations Manager functions
A typical process of forming an affiliation list by defining a scoped affiliation, and assigning people to it will include the following steps:
- Define a status within a unit of the University, this will be represented as a scoped affiliation in the form status@affiliation where status could be, for example, "Faculty member" and the affiliation will be the unit name. The status can be defined locally, but the unit must already be recognised within the University
- Upload a locally held list of people to be considered for inclusion in a list. The list is uploaded as a CSV file with a fixed minimum set of fields and an unlimited user-defined set of fields. The data is then automatically matched against data held in CUD
- Review (in a web interface or using a downloaded file) the matches made by CUD
- Confirm membership of the affiliation (in a web interface or file upload)
- Add people to CUD where they do not match an existing record, with the affiliation stored on their person document
- Remove people from an affiliation list as their status changes
- Compare affiliations derived from centrally administered systems with those defined locally
Affiliations Manager benefits
Benefits of the Affiliations Manager are that:
- affiliations are stored in a centrally supported service
- an unlimited number of affiliations can be stored
- affiliations are searchable by all registered users of CUD
- data administrators are able to maintain lists of people affiliated with their units in a form in which records are linked to consolidated person documents held in CUD, easing the task of maintaining accurate data
- additional data for members of an affiliation list may be stored, and is visible only to administrators of that list
- affiliations may be used to define groups in the forthcoming Groupstore service, and so could be used for access control
Register for the Affiliations Manager
To register as a user of the CUD service please contact iam@it.ox.ac.uk.
