The public will soon have more access to the academic history of UA faculty when a new directory known as UA Profiles publicly launches on Oct. 1.

The new directory gives “a broader location for the community at large to be able to learn more about our faculty and other academic professionals who are at the university,” said Maliaca Oxnam, associate librarian and UA Vitae project manager.

Currently, UA Profiles is available to students and staff with a NetID. Information is available on about 2,500 faculty and staff who have already approved their profiles.

Profiles contain biographical information such as work and education history, a list of courses taught at the university level, academic interests and scholarly contributions from journal publications to keynote presentations.

UA Profiles will not replace the UA Phonebook, which currently lists titles and contact info for current university employees. It will, however, supplement these with a “more info” link that will take users to the faculty’s UA profile.

The target audience for the site includes students looking for scholars to collaborate with or perhaps to take courses from, and also community members looking for an expert in a certain field, according to Oxnam.

Creators of the site are also hopeful that UA Profiles will help facilitate corporate collaborations and sponsorships.

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Corporate sponsorships are a key part of UA’s strategic plan, Never Settle. The UA unit created to help commercialize UA inventions, Tech Launch Arizona, has seen increasing success since its creation in 2012.

Paul Tumarkin, the senior manager for marketing and communications at TLA, said in an email that he sees “a tool like UA Profiles being very useful.”

“As we work to bring the inventions of the UA from the lab to the marketplace, we are keenly aware that the ultimate resource needed to help us achieve our goals is people,” Tumarkin said.

In an effort to make the input of the information into UA Profiles easier for faculty, the new directory pulls from information already input by faculty from UA’s online performance review program, UA Vitae.

UA professionals like Oxnam have helped colleges switch their annual faculty performance reviews from paper-based systems to UA Vitae since 2013.

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A future use for UA Profiles may be the input of graduate student profiles. The UA Graduate College is currently in discussion about creating a process for graduate students to demonstrate their work on the site.

While UA@Work reported in August that graduate students would be added to the directory in the coming academic year, Andrew Carnie, dean of the Graduate College, said in an email that this announcement was premature.

“We’re at least a year (probably more) away from having the facilities up and running that would allow us to do that,” Carnie said. “So at this time adding grad students to UA profiles is on hold.”

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