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- Introduction to the Directory Service
-
- The directory service helps you to find out information about people and the
- organisations they work for: in particular it can provide electronic mail
- addresses, postal addresses, telephone and fax numbers.
- Once you have provided information about a person's NAME and where they are
- based, the directory service will search various local and remote databases
- to try and find information about people with a name matching the one you
- have given.
-
- The directory service can, of course, only find entries for people who
- work for organisations who are participating in this pilot service. In
- May 1991, there were over 400 participating organisations and approximately
- 350,000 individual entries in the Directory.
-
- If you cannot find an entry for the person you are looking for, it may be
- that the entry is in the Directory but that the Directory Service does not
- recognise the name you have provided. In this case, you might like to
- LIST some of the entries in the Directory: you can list people within a
- DEPARTMENT, DEPARTMENTs within an ORGANISATION, ORGANISATIONs within a
- COUNTRY, and list countries which have participating ORGANISATIONs.
-
- When using the directory service, you will be prompted to type in:
-
- :- the NAME of the person whose address you are looking for
- (e.g. "Paul Barker", or "P Barker", or even just "Barker"))
-
- :- their DEPARTMENT
- (e.g. "Computer Science", or simply press <CR> to search within all
- DEPARTMENTs)
-
- :- the ORGANISATION they work for
- (e.g. "University College London", or "UCL")
-
- :- the COUNTRY in which the ORGANISATION is based
- (e.g. "gb", "uk" or "Britain" for Great Britain).
-
- The line above the prompt (:- ) indicates what information the system
- is expecting. This line also indicates the default (what the
- Directory Service will fill in as information if you press <CR>).
-
- On-line HELP is always available: type
-
- ? for HELP on information currently expected
- ?? for HELP on HELP (how to use on-line HELP)
- ?WORD for HELP on any topic, where WORD refers to any of the words displayed
- in capital letters on this or any other HELP screen. For example,
- ?NAME, ?name, ?department, etc.
-
- Further useful commands:
-
- Control-C to abandon whatever you are doing: i.e.
- abandon a current query and allow for the entry of another query;
- abandon the entry of a query and allow the re-entry of the query;
- if no current query, exit the Directory Service.
-
- q to quit the Directory Service, when given in response to a
- request for a person's name. q typed at the other prompts asks
- the user to confirm that they wish to quit.
-
-
-